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Skilled hands of a lost husband hold out hope for artist

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February 02, 2012|By Liz Kowalczyk

Richard Mangino, 65, received a double forearm and hand transplant four… (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe…)

To say Steven Lloyd was good with his hands would be an understatement. He refurbished the run-down ranch house he and his wife, Jodi, bought when they were engaged, installing walls and plumbing, and built a wrap-around deck and stone walls along the property’s edge. He repaired friends’ cars and restored a 25-year-old Jeep for off-roading.

But Lloyd was unexpectedly stricken by a massive brain hemorrhage in October, on the day before his 44th birthday. As he lay dying in the hospital, the New England Organ Bank called his wife at their New Hampshire home with a special request: Did she want to donate her husband’s hands?

Jodi Lloyd hung up and turned the question over in her mind for several hours. “Why let these hands go to waste?’’ thought Lloyd, recalling her decision in an interview this week. “Steven’s talents were in his hands. It just made sense to me.’’

Within days, doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston transplanted Steven Lloyd’s hands and lower arms onto Richard Mangino, who had lost his forearms, as well as his lower legs, to a bloodstream infection.

Now, four months later, Mangino, 65, has made tremendous progress in learning how to use his new hands. He picks up and stacks one-inch-square wooden cubes as part of his rehabilitation routine, and he opens the refrigerator door and wraps the fingers of both hands around the milk carton to lift it out. The hair and fingernails on his new hands are growing. And Mangino, an artist, is playing piano already and looks forward to painting.

Jodi Lloyd, who met Mangino at the Brigham in October, said if she could have chosen the person to give her husband’s hands to, it would have been him. “It’s sad what happened to Steven, but there is some comfort,’’ she said.

The Lloyds had no clues that tragedy was about to befall their family. Steven Lloyd was healthy and energetic. He loved to ride dirt bikes, all-terrain vehicles, and snowmobiles with his family on the unpaved roads that weave in and around Troy, the town where they live. He worked as a supervisor at Teleflex Medical OEM, which manufactures medical devices, in Jaffrey, N.H. - his employer for 25 years.

But on the morning of Oct. 1, he told his wife that he had a terrible headache. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub and held his head. “Something is not right,’’ he said. They were the last words he spoke to her.

An ambulance took Lloyd to a nearby the community hospital, which transferred him to UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester for advanced care. Later, doctors told Jodi Lloyd that they believe he was born with a malformation in the blood vessels in his brain, and eventually they burst. But he had no symptoms, so no one knew.