Penn surgical team gives young woman new hands
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PHILADELPHIA -- A University of Pennsylvania team of 30 surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists hovered over the young woman for almost 12 hours, connecting bones, blood vessels, muscles, nerves and skin.
At the end of that September marathon, Lindsay Ess, 28, of Richmond, Va., had hands and forearms instead of stumps.
"We chose the most difficult patient first," team leader L. Scott Levin said Tuesday at a news conference detailing the double hand transplant -- a feat that only three other U.S. medical centers have achieved.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center performed the nation's first double hand transplant in May 2009 on an Augusta, Ga., man who lost both of his hands and feet to a sepsis infection.
Penn officials declined to identify their inaugural patient, per her request.
But a family friend, Matt Mendelsohn of Arlington, Va., confirmed that Ms. Ess had the surgery on Sept. 21. Mr. Mendelsohn, a photojournalist, has chronicled Ms. Ess's indomitable comeback from a 2007 bloodstream infection that left her a quadruple amputee.
Mr. Mendelsohn conveyed a message from Ms. Ess' mother, Judith Aronson: "Lindsay's going through very intensive rehabilitation. It's stressful and she's very tired. She's not doing any other stories because she needs to focus."
Ms. Ess spends several hours a day at the Penn Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in Rittenhouse Square. She and her mother are staying at a guest house for transplant patients.
Penn's hand transplant program is the product of more than two years of preparation, said Dr. Levin, an orthopedic and plastic surgeon recruited from Duke University to build on Penn's existing solid-organ transplant success.
The hands are obtained through the Gift of Life Donor Program, the nonprofit that recovers and distributes organs in the Philadelphia region. The donor, who was not identified, had to have hands the same size, skin color and tissue type as Ms. Ess.
Only about 60 people in the world have successfully undergone hand transplantation since the first one in France in 1998.
The operation remains somewhat controversial because, unlike major organ replacements, "composite tissue" transplants -- so-called because they involve attaching blood, bones, nerves and soft tissue -- are not life-saving. Yet patients must take immune-suppressing drugs to prevent transplant rejection for the rest of their lives, just like organ recipients.
First Published November 2, 2011 12:00 am
