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On Facebook, he describes himself as a "wounded warrior...very wounded."
Brendan Marrocco
was the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War,
and doctors revealed Monday that he's received a double-arm transplant.
Those new arms "already move a little," he tweeted a month after the operation.
Marrocco, a 26-year-old New Yorker, was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He had the transplant Dec. 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his father said Monday.
Alex Marrocco
said his son does not want to talk with reporters until a news
conference Tuesday at the hospital, but the younger Marrocco has
repeatedly mentioned the transplant on Twitter and posted photos.
"Ohh yeah today has been one month since my surgery and they already move a little," Brendan Marrocco tweeted Jan. 18.
Responding to a tweet from NASCAR
driver Brad Keselowski, he wrote: "dude I can't tell you how exciting
this is for me. I feel like I finally get to start over."
The infantryman also received
bone marrow from the same dead donor who supplied his new arms. That
novel approach is aimed at helping his body accept the new limbs with
minimal medication to prevent rejection.
The military sponsors operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Unlike a life-saving heart or
liver transplant, limb transplants are aimed at improving quality of
life, not extending it. Quality of life is a key concern for people
missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced
as those for feet and legs.
"He was the first quad amputee to survive," and there have been four others since then, Alex Marrocco said.
The Marroccos want to thank the
donor's family for "making a selfless decision ... making a difference
in Brendan's life," the father said.
Brendan Marrocco has been in
public many times. During a July 4 visit last year to the Sept. 11
Memorial with other disabled soldiers, he said he had no regrets about
his military service.
"I wouldn't change it in any way. ... I feel great. I'm still the same person," he said.
The 13-hour operation was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Johns Hopkins. It was the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant done in the United States.
Lee led three of those earlier
operations when he worked at the University of Pittsburgh, including the
only above-elbow transplant that had been done at the time, in 2010.
Marrocco's "was the most
complicated one" so far, Lee said in an interview Monday. It will take
more than a year to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new
arms.
"The maximum speed is an inch a
month for nerve regeneration," he explained. "We're easily looking at a
couple years" until the full extent of recovery is known.
While at Pittsburgh, Lee
pioneered the immune-suppression approach used for Marrocco. The surgeon
led hand-transplant operations on five patients, giving them marrow
from their donors in addition to the new limbs. All five recipients have
done well, and four have been able to take just one anti-rejection drug
instead of combination treatments most transplant patients receive.
Minimizing anti-rejection drugs
is important because they have side effects and raise the risk of cancer
over the long term. Those risks have limited the willingness of
surgeons and patients to do more hand, arm and even face transplants.
Lee has received funding for his
work from AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a
cooperative research network of top hospitals and universities around
the country that the government formed about five years ago. With
government money, he and several other plastic surgeons around the
country are preparing to do more face transplants, possibly using the
new immune-suppression approach.
Marrocco expects to spend three
to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to
continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had
been fitted with prosthetic legs and had learned to walk on his own.
He had been living with his older
brother in a specially equipped home on New York's Staten Island that
had been built with the help of several charities. Shortly after moving
in, he said it was "a relief to not have to rely on other people so
much."
The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.
Despite being in a lot of pain
for some time after the operation, Marrocco showed a sense of humor, his
father said. He had a hoarse voice from the tube that was in his throat
during the long surgery and decided he sounded like Al Pacino. He soon
started doing movie lines.
"He was making the nurses laugh," Alex Marrocco said.
Associated Press Writer Stephanie Nano in New York contributed to this report.
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