Mother, 26, gets new hand

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For the past five years, Emily Fennell has been single-handedly raising her daughter. In 2006 she was in a car accident. Her right hand was caught in the open sunroof between the car and the road. Doctors at the UCLA Medical Center determined it was too severely injured to save, and it had to be amputated.

"I had my accident when she was only 14 months old, so she's never known me with two hands," said Fennell who was the first person to receive a hand transplant in the western United States. "So for her to think that this is cool and for her to be supportive of the decision I've made is very important to me."

Now, five years later, Emily is undergoing intensive physical therapy to help her brain mechanically learn how to use a new hand she received from a donor. But medical director of the UCLA Hand Transplant Program, Dr. Sue McDiarmid, made sure Emily was aware of the risks.

"It's a little bit different if you are receiving a heart or liver transplant," said McDiarmid. "These are life-saving organs. Her hand is a life-changing organ, and she needed to understand that risk-benefit ratio for herself as to whether she'd be willing to go forward in life with the use of immunosuppressive drugs."

These immunosuppressive medications are drugs Fennell will have to take for the rest of her life so that her body won't reject the new hand. But the immunosuppressive drugs come with side effects.

"Infection is the one shadow that falls over anybody that's on any kind of immunosuppression," said McDiarmid. "We watch for kidney dysfunction. We watch for any evidence of malignancy."

But the 26-year-old mother isn't put off by the rigorous physical therapy or the heavy doses of medication if it means getting something back she thought she lost forever.

"Right now it seems surreal that I didn't have a hand for those five years," said Fennell. "I do feel like it's mine, slowly but surely every day it becomes more and more mine."

Since the accident Fennell has learned to type 40 words a minutes with just her left hand. Her physicians expects her to gain sensation in her right hand within the year.