21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder wrote in her notebook a year after her hand transplant, “Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.”
Today, her handwriting almost matches her original, but what has left doctors surprised is how the colour of Shreya’s hands, which once belonged to a 20-year-old man from Kerala until his death in August 2017, had changed to match the rest of her skin tone.
“I don’t know how the transformation occurred. But it feels like my own hands now. The skin colour was very dark after the transplant, not that it was ever my concern, but now it matches my tone,” says 21-year-old Shreya, who underwent Asia’s first inter-gender hand transplant.
Back in Kochi, where she underwent the double-hand transplant at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS), surgeons are researching whether female hormones could hold the key to such changes.
“The transplant coordinator said it could take months for a donor to come. We returned to our hotel without any hope. An hour later, the hospital called us back for urgent blood tests,” Shreya was quoted saying.
Miraculously, the doctors found a donor for her on the same day, i.e, August 9, 2017. Sachin, a B.Com student had been declared brain dead that day and his family had agreed to donate his organs including his hands. And, as Shreya’s blood type was compatible with Sachin, she underwent the double-hand transplant. It took over 13 hours and a team of 20 surgeons and 16 anaesthesia specialists to successfully attach the hand to Shreya’s body.
After that, for a year-and-a-half, Shreya underwent intensive physiotherapy in Kochi. “The hand felt heavy, it was bulky initially,” she said. However, in the last 3-4 months, Shreya’s mother Suma noticed that her fingers were becoming leaner. “I see her hand every day. The fingers have become like a woman’s, the wrist is smaller. These are remarkable changes,” she was quoted saying.
Dr Subramania Iyer, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Amrita Institute said that they never anticipated such changes. “This is our first case of male-to-female hand transplant. We can only guess that female hormones have led to the change but assessing the exact cause is difficult,” he added.
As Shreya’s hand started matching her skin tone, doctors were surprised as no scientific evidence exists to record changes in skin tone or shape of the hand.
According to doctors, this might be the first case perhaps as Shreya underwent Asia’s first inter-gender hand transplant.
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