Louisville, Ky. (WHAS11) - A rare-first ever in Louisville-double hand transplant procedure wrapped up Wednesday afternoon at Jewish Hospital.
Doctors used Twitter to post updates during the surgery and now they're talking about its success.
Making medical history again, Jewish Hospital performs its first ever double hand transplant. It took more than 20 hours with as many as eight surgeons working at one time. But this was especially unique; the patient's hands were intact but severely burned and essentially unusable.
Everything except the nerves were amputated and removed.
"We were able to salvage tissue available from the hand to help reconstruct the new hand. So in essence we were able to take a hand from the donor then drape it or slide it over the structures we could save and which were functionally and could help," says Dr Warren Breidenbach.
Surgeons would not reveal any of the details about the recipient other than he was man and suffered severe scarring from burns to both his hands.
"When he was eating he would have to cradle the food like this . He could not get the keys out of his pockets. If they got too deep and he was out in public he'd have to ask someone for help getting his keys out, “says Dr Breidenbach.
Another first, updates on the surgery were posted on Twitter. A doctor near the operating room started tweeting at 7:00 Tuesday night.
Not only could the family see what was happening, but people around the world.
"This is our first experience Tweeting. This is kind of a groundbreaking way to do this. There's not a lot of facilities that do hand transplants. There's only a couple here in the United States. Us being one of them to be able to do a procedure like this is fairly groundbreaking for any hospital, “says Jewish Hospital CEO, Martin Bonick.
Doctors say the next 24 to 48 hours will be critical to see if his body will accept the donor hands.
