Indian amputee’s new lower limbs adapt to her body

NEW DELHI: When amputee Shreya Siddanagowder was offered new hands, the Indian student didn´t hesitate — even though they were big, dark and hairy, and once belonged to a man. Now though, not only have her new hands become more slender, they have also changed colour to match her skin tone, mystifying the doctors who carried out the rare 13-hour transplant. “The donor was a tall man with big spindly fingers,” Siddanagowder´s mother Suma told AFP by phone from their home in Pune in western India. “Now nobody can make out that they are a man´s hands... She has even started wearing jewellery and nail varnish. Siddanagowder´s life was turned upside down in 2016 when, aged 18, she was involved in a bus accident that crushed both her arms. A delay in getting first aid meant that both her hands had to be amputated below the elbow. Only 200 successful hand transplants have taken place worldwide — including nine in India — since the first in the United States in 1999 on a man whose left lower limb had been blown off by a firework.

The first in India was conducted in 2015 at the Amrita Institute of Medical Science (AIMS) in the southern state of Kerala, where Siddanagowder´s family took her. The biggest problem was finding a donor. For cultural reasons, Indian families are often reluctant for the hands of their loved ones to be made available after their death. “Usually you have to wait for a long time,” said Subramania Iyer, a member of a team of doctors who operated on Siddanagowder. As a result, those seeking a transplant “are so desperate that they don´t mind if the hands are from a different gender”, Iyer, a specialist in reconstructive surgery, told AFP. Eventually, the hospital obtained a pair of hands from a man in August 2017. Siddanagowder and her family accepted. The donor hands were first attached by the bones before the tendons, blood vessels and skin were painstakingly stitched together. After the transplant, she had to undergo more than a year of physiotherapy for her body and brain to get used to the new hands and obtain mobility and sensation.