A FRENCH house painter who became the first person to receive a double arm transplant has spoken for the first time about his five-year struggle to accept his new hands.

“It’s been very long, but it’s really worthwhile,’ said Denis Chatelier, 38, who lost his forearms in 1996 when a model rocket exploded as he was trying to launch it.

“The most moving thing was when my 18-month-old son said ‘hand’ and then kissed it. I felt his kiss. It was magnificent.

“I am very happy to have thrown myself into this adventure. It’s a success and I’m very satisfied. I can undertake all the gestures of daily life, except carrying very heavy weights. The hairs on my hands are growing again. I can feel hot and cold and pressure.”

M Chatelier said that he could shave, cut his fingernails and carry his four young children. He has taken up fishing and can drive his car again.

M Chatelier’s progress has exceeded medical expectations and prompted Jean-Michel Dubernard, the surgeon who oversaw the operation, to envisage face transplants. “We are technically ready to do that, but it would raise ethical questions,” he said.

Professor Dubernard led a team of 18 surgeons, including Nadey Hakim, of St Mary’s Hospital, West London, in the 17-hour operation at Edouard Herriot hospital, Lyons, France, to graft arms on to M Chatelier in January 2000.

At the time, the professor said that although he and his team had managed to attach the limbs below the elbow and to join arteries, veins, tendons, muscles, nerves and bones, the hardest test lay ahead. He said that success depended upon M Chatelier’s physical and psychological adaptation to the forearms, which were removed from the body of a 19-year-old man who had died after falling from a bridge.

“One of the most difficult questions was to know how the recipient could live with someone else’s hands,” Professor Dubernard said.

The psychiatrists who followed M Chatelier said that he referred to les mains (the hands) after the operation. But when he was able to feel with his fingertips, he spoke about mes mains (my hands). The experts said the appropriation was complete when he began making typical Gallic gestures to accompany his words.

“Everything became easier when he started speaking with his hands,” Danièle Bachman, a psychiatrist, said.

Although M Chatelier was given medication to suppress his immune system, doctors were unsure whether his body would reject the skin graft. But Professor Dubernard said that there had only been two signs of rejection, on the 51st and 83rd days after the operation. Both had been treated with corti sone.

Using MRI scanners, neuroscientists have also found that M Chatelier’s brain has recovered the ability to co-ordinate and anticipate hand movements. Professor Dubernard said that he had been surprised by the flexibility of the motor cortex, which controls such movements. A total of 26 people have had hand transplants since 2000, six of them double hand transplants. Doctors say that M Chatelier’s recovery is particularly important because he has stood the test of time.

M Chatelier said that every year he lay a rose at the shrine in Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, and said a prayer for the family of the donor whose arms he received.

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