Soldier looks forward to driving with new arms
Jan 29, 2013, 5:09 PM
Associated Press
BALTIMORE (AP) – A soldier who lost all four limbs in an Iraq roadside bombing says he looks forward to driving and swimming with his new arms.
Twenty-six-year-old Brendan Marrocco spoke at a news conference Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was joined by the surgeons who performed the double-arm transplant there.
Marrocco says he’s happy and amazed to have new arms. He has prosthetic legs but says that without arms, he felt “kind of lost for a while.”
The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever conducted in the United States.
The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. The New York City man also received bone marrow from the same dead donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection.
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