Tea's up: Mark Cahil serves a cuppa to wife Sylvia thanks to his new hand
Simple tasks like dialling a number on his
mobile phone had been impossible for Mr Cahill when he suffered from
gout and infections
Cup of tea? No problem now for Mr Cahill. Turn the TV on? Easy with his new hand on the remote control.
Ah,
but those cursed buttons. For the last years of the 52-year-old’s
illness, infection paralysed his right hand as gout crippled his left.
So
his loyal wife Sylvia partly buttoned his shirts, to allow him to slip
them over his head; she then fastened the last buttons for him. Soon she
expects to be relieved of shirt-button duty.
They
even hold hands like young lovers ‘just because we can’, she said. Yet
both know Mrs Cahill, 48, is holding a stranger’s hand. They have no
idea who the donor was.
‘You
can’t stop yourself wondering at first but I don’t dwell on it,’ Mr
Cahill said. ‘You can think too much about that sort of thing. I still
just sit and look at it in amazement. I can’t believe it. But it’s part
of me now – my hand, my life.’
Mark Cahill puts his socks on using his new transplanted hand
Prescription: Mr Cahill with the huge array of pills he has to take every day
The transplant at Leeds General Infirmary was unique as the original hand was removed in the same procedure.
In the eight-hour operation a team
led by consultant plastic surgeon Professor Simon Kay connected the
bones, tendons, nerves, arteries and veins before the skin was stitched
shut.
Result
(initially, at least): A bruised, scarred and unfamiliar hand at the
end of his right arm. And fingers that pointed the way to a new lease of
life.
‘When the swelling
goes down and the skin becomes the same colour you won’t be able to tell
the difference,’ Mr Cahill said. ‘The nails grow and there are hairs
growing,’ he adds, wiggling each finger independently.
‘It
will never be totally mine, it’s smaller than my left hand and of
course the fingerprints aren’t the same. But the difference it makes is
incredible.’
Mark Cahill during his training for the Royal Marines aged 17 in 1978 and with wife Sylvia today
Mr Cahill left the Marines before
completing full training, and every subsequent career involved using his
hands. But gout struck him at the age of 32, causing the joints on his
left hand to swell and the fingers to curl.
Then
his right hand became infected and, eventually, paralysed. And when his
disability worsened, he was forced to leave the pub he ran locally with
his wife.
Mr Cahill was offered a prosthetic hand but opted for the real thing. Professor Kay thinks this was the right choice.
He
told me: ‘The thing that’s remarkable about Mark is the speed of
recovery. And his attitude is absolutely fantastic. He just gets on with
it. He is a Yorkshireman, after all.’
