BALTIMORE _ Zion Harvey once dreamed of throwing a football like Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco.
Some dreams do come true.
Not only can Zion hurl a football, but he recently pitched a baseball over home plate at a Baltimore Orioles game. He can write with a pencil and hold a fork.
The Randallstown boy could not perform any of these ordinary tasks a year ago. His hands and feet were amputated at age 2 after a sepsis infection caused him to develop gangrene. Then surgeons at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia performed a groundbreaking bilateral hand transplant _ giving him new hands and forearms.
On Tuesday, the 9-year-old returned to the Philadelphia hospital, where doctors changed the course of his life, to mark the first anniversary of being the first child ever to undergo a bilateral hand transplant.
The journey to this day was long and arduous. After the surgery, Zion spent more than a month at the hospital recovering and participating in rigorous occupational and physical therapy. He then headed back home where intense daily therapy continued at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. He spent eight hours a day performing exercises that would help his brain learn once again to communicate with his limbs. Other exercises helped his muscles and tendons gain strength and flexibility. Therapists incorporated his interest in sports into therapy.
Using brain mapping, doctors are able to track Harvey's rehabilitation and directly link therapy to what is going on in his brain.
Doctors will monitor Harvey for the rest of his life. His hands are expected to continue to grow as he does. As with all transplants, he must take daily immunosuppressant drugs so his body does not reject his new limbs. Zion underwent a kidney transplant at age 4 and was already taking the drugs, making him a good candidate for the hands transplants.
A team of 40, including nurses and other staff from plastic and reconstructive surgery, orthopedic surgery, anesthesiology, and radiology, took part in the 10-hour operation. They came from Penn Medicine, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Shriners Hospitals for Children.
Zion's team of doctors call the boy a pioneer and hope to one day perform the same surgery on other children, and maybe one day even adults.
Zion a round faced, bright-eyed youngster, never let the fact that he had no hands slow him down much. He could strum a guitar, play foosball, scroll through his mom's iPhone and feed himself. But kids at school sometimes made fun of him and there were some things he couldn't do.
His mother, Pattie Ray, wanted him to be able to do things other children could do. She took him to Shriners Hospitals for Children in Philadelphia looking for suitable prosthetics. The boy had never found a pair he liked. The doctor soon introduced her to L. Scott Levin, the lead surgeon on Zion's transplant, and the path for hand transplants began.
The surgery is part of a growing transplant field, which has moved beyond internal organs to extremities like hands, arms and even faces. In 2012, a group of Johns Hopkins doctors transplanted arms on a soldier injured in the Iraq war and the University of Maryland Medical Center performed a face transplant that same year. Levin, chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania medical school and Director of the Hand Transplantation Program at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, performed a hand transplant on a woman in 2011.
