Soldier upbeat after double arm transplant

BALTIMORE -- A soldier from Staten Island who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he's looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double arm transplant.

"I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can," Brendan Marrocco, 26, said at a news conference Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.

After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.

"You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," he said.

Marrocco said his chief desire is to drive the black Dodge Charger that's been sitting in his garage for three years.

"I used to love to drive," he said. "I'm really looking forward to just getting back to that, and just becoming an athlete again."

Although he doesn't expect to excel at soccer, his favorite sport, Marrocco said he'd like to swim and compete in a marathon using a hand cycle.

Marrocco's good humor and optimism are among the qualities doctors cited as signs he will recover much of his arm and hand use in two to three years.

"He's a young man with a tremendous amount of hope, and he's stubborn -- stubborn in a good way," said Dr. Jaimie Shores, the hospital's clinical director of hand transplantation. "I think the sky's the limit."

The procedure was only the seventh double hand or double arm transplant ever done in the United States.

Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, head of the team that conducted the surgery, said the new arms could eventually provide much of the same function as Marrocco's original arms and hands. Another double arm transplant patient can now use chopsticks and tie his shoes.