Boy with New Hands Says Best Part is Being Able to Hug Mom

Zion Harvey said he just wanted new hands so he could pick up his sister and swing on monkey bars. The 9-year-old was the first child to undergo a double hand transplant, making medical history last summer.

"Now, I can get myself dressed without anybody helping me," said Harvey, whose hands were amputated when he was 2 years old due to sepsis, an infection in the bloodstream.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which performed the surgery to provide hands and forearms for Harvey last summer, said that it may take two years of physical therapy for him to get acclimated. The hospital released a video this week documenting the year since the surgery.

One month after surgery, Harvey said he wanted to write a letter to the parents of the child whose hands he received because he realized they did not have to do that.

"From an emotional standpoint, he remains a remarkable young man," said Dr. L. Scott Levin, director of the hand transplant program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Eight months after surgery, Levin said the boy in fact was writing, he could button his own buttons and he was able to zip up his zipper. Those feats came through discipline.

"Here we've had weeks of hospitalization, a daily request for him to interact, to do therapy, to do testing ... and there's never been one iota of resistance or 'I don't want to today' or things we might hear from an adult, let alone a child," Levin said.

Harvey spends up to eight hours a day doing therapy at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore — he lives in nearby Owings Mills — as his brain retrains itself to work with limbs he's been missing for six years.

"We quickly learned Zion's interest in sports and tapped into that," said Lindsey Harris and Gayle Gross, Zion's occupational therapists at Kennedy Krieger Institute. "...we started with basketball and progressed to baseball, culminating in his recent accomplishment of throwing out the first pitch at an Orioles game."

He tossed out the first pitch Aug. 2 at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

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"I'm still the same kid everybody knew without hands. But I can do everything now. I can do the same things even better," Harvey said.

What is his favorite thing to do with his hands?

On the "Today" show on Wednesday, Harvey said: "Just being able to wrap them around my mom."

"I believe he could have done anything without hands, but now his light will shine even brighter," Pattie Ray said in a statement. "I know those hands are going to be used in great ways."

She said she thinks about and thanks daily the people who donated their child's hands to her son through the Gift of Life Donor Program.

The gift that was given to him has implications worldwide; Harvey was the first child to receive a double hand transplant, and his experience will pave the way for other children.

"Zion is a pioneer. With each week since his surgery, our team has learned more that will inform their efforts to perform future bilateral hand transplants and afford more children and adults a better quality of life," Dr. Abraham Shaked, director of the Penn Transplant Institute, said in a statement.

Before he left the hospital in Philadelphia, Harvey told his treatment team that he was confident the future was bright for the next child who came along needing new hands because they would do the same for that person.

Said Harvey: "You will make them feel a part of the world again."

Still of Zion Harvey from YouTube video by Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.