By Janice Lloyd, USA TODAY
Former soldier Brendan Marrocco is speaking publicly Tuesday for the
first time about his long recovery from a bomb blast in Iraq and what it
feels like to have two new transplanted arms.
Marrocco, 26, of
Staten Island, N.Y., was the first servicemember of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan to survive the loss of four limbs. He has said he "doesn't
regret a thing." He's already moving his new arms.
"My arms have
given me a lot of hope. They feel great," Marrocco said in a briefing
from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where he was the first soldier
to receive a double arm transplant. "Don't have any pain anymore.
Currently I don't have any feeling yet, but we'll get there. I can move
my wrist a little bit."
He lost both legs above the knees, his
left arm below the elbow and his right arm above the elbow in Iraq when
a military vehicle he was driving on Easter 2009 was struck by a
roadside bomb.
Marrocco is one of only seven people in the USA who
have undergone successful double arm transplants. The 13-hour surgery
was performed at Johns Hopkins on Dec. 18. It will take more than a year
to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new arms, according
to W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgeon at Johns Hopkins.
Asked what
he looks forward to, Marrocco said, "I want to drive again. I used to
really enjoy driving. It was a lot of fun for me. And I also want to
hand cycle a marathon."
"I'm looking forward to doing everything I
could do before I got hurt,'' Marracco said. "I hated not having hands.
You do everything with your hands."
The surgery involved the connection of bones, blood vessels, muscles, tendons, nerves and skins on both arms. Lee told The Washington Post
that new arms are never going to have 100% of the function of the limbs
they replace, but patients have learned to tie shoes, use chopsticks
and put their hair in ponytails.
In a second innovative procedure, Marrocco was given a new
anti-rejection regimen using bone marrow from the deceased donor. That
allows him to not have to rely heavily on the anti-rejection transplant
medications that have side effects, can cause cancer and threaten
organs. Lee developed that approach while working at the University of
Pittsburgh.
His new arms "already move a little," Marrocco tweeted
a month after the operation. He described himself on Facebook as "a
wounded warrior, very wounded."
The military is sponsoring
operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms
or hands in the wars. While many of the soldiers who lose lower limbs
are outfitted with prostheses, those devices are not as advanced for
arms and hands.
The gathering at the briefing laughed when Johns
Hopkins' surgeon Jaimie Shores kidded, "He won't throw like Baltimore
Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco,'' competing in this weekend's Super Bowl,
"but he can try to throw a football sometime. I don't think we'll be
able to hold him back."