Zion Harvey, 9, received a double hand transplant one year ago at Penn Medicine and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and he couldn't be improving any better, according to CBS News.
Last year Zion had a transplant of both his hands and forearms in the first operation of its kind to have been performed on a child. He had originally lost his hands and feet at 2 years of age because of an infection that also led to organ failure and a kidney transplant.
His surgeon, Dr. L. Scott Levin, said, “His brain says for his hands to move and they move. And that in and of itself is remarkable because for six years of his life, that part of his brain, if you will, was asleep."
According to CBS, Zion's surgery was 10 hours long and required a team of 40 nurses, doctors and surgeons. The surgery had never been done on a child before, and at the time, only 25 hand transplants had been done worldwide.
“Now I can get myself dressed without anybody helping me. Now I can get a snack out of the refrigerator without anybody helping me,” Harvey said. “Now I’ve got one left hand and one right hand, and they can always help me when I fall down. I will get back up.”
Read more at CBS News.