Transplant Recipient: Two Hands After Losing Them
- In the fall of 2024, Luka Krizanac, a 28 -year -old Swiss young man, woke up in a hospital bed in Pennsylvania, United States, then a complex operation...
- "Look at my hands, see how beautiful they are," he says he said when he regained consciousness, his nurse told him later.
- "It may seem superficial because we use (that word) to describe aesthetic things but, for me, it encompasses a feeling of fullness," says Luka.
Image source, Luka Krizanac
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- Author, BBC World Service
- Author’s title, Serie Outlook*
In the fall of 2024, Luka Krizanac, a 28 -year -old Swiss young man, woke up in a hospital bed in Pennsylvania, United States, then a complex operation in his hands.
“Look at my hands, see how beautiful they are,” he says he said when he regained consciousness, his nurse told him later.
“It may seem superficial because we use (that word) to describe aesthetic things but, for me, it encompasses a feeling of fullness,” says Luka.
“It was such a full moment of joy, that it is difficult to compare it with anything else I have experienced in my life.”
And it is that those hands that observed with such attention were not those with which he was born: they were the result of a successful double transplant that received 17 years after having lost his own limbs.
A “winter flu”
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Luka’s drama began a winter afternoon when he was 12 years old, and his father went on to look for him and his younger brother for a birthday party.
“I remember that we had a great time, and then I started to cough and lose your voice,” Luka tells BBC Outlook.
The cough became “throat pain and then in a severe chest pain. I could not walk for how intense the pain was.”
His parents took him to the hospital, but the doctors dismissed his case by adjudicating their symptoms to a viral infection, or a typical seasonal flu.
But his state of health went from bad to worse: the analgesics did not relieve their pain, increasingly acute, and Luka returned to the hospital where the night spent.
Image source, Luka Krizanac
“The next morning my body had collapsed completely,” says Luka, who at that time had developed severe sepsis with multiorgan failure, and began to lose consciousness.
“One of the last moments I remember is that (nurses) tried to put intravenous tubes in all limbs and (needles) dried.”
All his blood had retired to his vital organs, far from his legs and hands, to keep him alive; The only possible option was now amputated.
Thus, Luka lost her two hands and legs below her knees.
Wake up
Luka spent six months hospitalized, most of the time in an induced coma.
“Due to the medication they administered to me, my world was basically a mixture between what my senses experienced and what my mind imagined. I did not really see myself lying on a bed, but what I saw mentally were long hospital corridors. I saw myself walking through them and never getting at the end, because there was another door that opened and a new corridor …” says Luka.
“It was like being caught in a surreal painting.”
Once the confusion was overcome, Luka began to feel that there was something different with his body. But the implications of living without his hands understood them much later.
Image source, Luka Krizanac
Soon, he started using prosthetic legs
“Usually, that is something very easy to solve. What do you do with your legs?
Thanks to the prostheses, Luka was able to recover many of the functions he had lost after surgery.
But regarding his hands, the situation was very different.
“I tried many hand prostheses over the years. I got used quite quickly to use what they call aesthetic prostheses, which are hands that have no function, but that allow you to grab things when both hands are used.”
With the support of his family- and the love of his friends and classmates- Luka returned to school. With his prosthetic hands he learned to have a pencil, he was able to draw and write again and also learned to eat without help.
The hope of a transplant
Hand transplants are not common. There are no current figures, but according to 2023 data of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom (NHS), since the first one was carried out in France, in 1998, more than 150 hand transplants or upper members have been made throughout the world.
Luka had to wait 17 years for his. Eventually he and his mother traveled to the United States in order to increase their chances of accessing this surgery.
It is a complex procedure that, as experts from Penn Medicine– the health system of the University of Pennsylvania explain, where Luka was performed, a preparation of at least two years involves.
Finding a compatible donor for bilateral transplant is difficult: among the factors to be considered, the type of blood, skin tone, size, muscle mass, sex and age of the donor are included
And, obviously, it depends on the generosity and kindness of a stranger who agrees to donate his hands.
Image source, Luka Krizanac
A few days before the visa that Luka and her mother had to remain in the US, one Sunday afternoon, the call that was waiting so much was waiting for arrived in the US
“Are you ready to have new hands?” Dr. L. Scott Levin told him on the other side of the line and Luka took a few seconds to understand what his surgeon was trying to say.
Soon, Luka was already in the hospital.
Absolute happiness
After surgery of more than 10 hours, in which an interdisciplinary team participated, with more than 20 people working simultaneously in the operating room, Luka woke up with a couple of new hands.
“From the first moment I felt that they were my hands, something I did not expect. The joy and happiness I felt made me completely forget the process of getting used to them,” Luka reflects.
Such was his happiness that his mother asked to take a photo in which his face and new hands were seen to put it on the wall of his hospital room.
As he recovered, Luka resumed activities that he did not do years ago.
“Suddenly I could send messages to my friends. That achievement, which may seem small to others, for me it was giant.”
“The most monumental thing was to be able to grab things, raise something, hold it,” he says.
Luka’s dream- which currently works in Banca- is to swim in the cold waters of the coast of Croatia, something he loved to do during the summers of his childhood.
Although he thinks of the future, he does not stop feeling deeply grateful to his donors, about those who often thinks.
“To think that at the moment that the family loses someone, who at that difficult time in life, make the decision to help a stranger, think of another person, for me it is the most human gesture I saw in my life.”
*This article is an adaptation of a BBC Outlook program, with reporting by Jo Fidgen, Elena Angelides, Florian Bohr and Maryam Maruf.
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