Pioneers: My Left Hand

SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM AT HIS OFFICE on the campus of Camden County College, where he heads the paramedic-training program, I find it exceedingly difficult to avoid staring at Matthew Scott’s left hand. While the differences between his hands are not immediately noticeable — except for the relatively limited dexterity of his left — the more one looks, the more apparent they become. The left hand appears older than the right. Its fingers seem a bit longer. The nail beds are also longer, and more elegant. The veins running beneath the skin’s surface are of a different thickness, and a different shade of blue. Different, too, are the tiny hairs sprouting from it, in texture, length and thickness. The skin is a slightly different shade of pink from that on the right side. This is because Matthew Scott’s left hand is not his own. Eight years ago, it was removed from another man’s arm and attached to Scott’s, in the first successful human hand transplantation in history.

His doctors had offered him a 50 percent probability that he would lose the hand in the first year. In terms of its functionality, Scott, 45, tells me it’s turned out better than he or his doctors ever anticipated: Though he still relies on his right for fine-motor work, his new hand is far more effective than his prosthetic was, and he can hold objects and throw a ball with his sons and tie his shoes and even type, albeit not well and extremely slowly, as well as experience hot and cold and pain, and distinguish between smooth and rough surfaces.

Scott says his desire to replace his hand — he lost it in an accident more than two decades ago — was straightforward: “I was incomplete. It was just something I needed to do to fix what I had done.”

But it hasn’t been easy. The body is programmed to protect itself by dispersing antibodies to seek out and destroy foreign cells, and though the episodes cleared up relatively quickly, Scott’s body thrice rejected the hand in the first year, a year during which he remembers being “sick as a dog every single day.” Even today, eight years later, rejection remains a possibility, and every day for the rest of his life he must take 12 pills that might cause serious health problems over the long term, including increased susceptibility to infection and a variety of diseases, even cancer.

And there are other issues. Over the 45 years since a surgeon first successfully transplanted a human kidney, transplant medicine concerned itself almost solely with the vital organs inside the body. Not only was it scientifically impossible to transplant external parts, but the consensus among ethicists was that the harvesting of a human body’s parts should occur only in the most extreme circumstance — to save a life. And so when surgeons attached the hand of another to Matthew Scott’s left arm eight years ago, they spirited forward a strange new era in transplant medicine. Body parts from penises to breasts to wombs have been transplanted as a result of Scott’s success. According to Scott’s doctor, human heads might not be far off.

---