Recently, doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other medical personnel from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (image right via Fuzzy 901 on Wikipedia) gave a 26-year traffic accident victim a new hand. The hand transplant performed by this team of 17 medical personnel accomplished this miracle by performing the first successful hand transplant ever done within the state of California. Five years ago the patient, a mother, had lost her hand in a traffic accident. The doctors say she should regain feeling in her new hand and the full use of it in about a year after completing rehabilitation.According to the story, UCLA Doctors Perform CA's 1st Successful Hand Transplant, on ktla.com, the surgery was the 13th such procedure in the U.S. since 1999 and the 40th in the world since the first one was done in France in 1998. UCLA opened it's hand transplant unit, only the fourth in the U.S., last year. Doctors have been performing re-attachments of amputated limbs for some time. Now, they have entered a whole new realm and given amputees more options and hope by integrating re-attachment surgeries with transplantation.
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