Corinne Hutton gets a manicure every two weeks. Corinne keeps a specific date in her calendar for this manicure. Her nails are always looking their best.
Corinne isn’t doing this out of vanity. It is her way to thank the stranger for his help three years ago.
‘I spoil myself now — I feel I have a responsibility to look after my hands so they look good all the time,’ says the 51-year-old former businesswoman from Lochwinnoch, Scotland, who now runs a charity.
“Every manicure I get, I give thanks to my donor.” “I always thank my donors.

Corinne suffered severe sepsis, which resulted in her losing both of her legs and hands. In sepsis the immune system is over-reacting to an infection (in this case, pneumonia), which causes the body to starve the blood vessels and limbs.
Corinne’s transplant surgery was three years ago. She has had to undergo intense daily physiotherapy, for four hours each day. It helps her master complex hand movements that most people don’t know.
She had to re-learn how to twist her wrists to tilt and drink from a cup, for example — and all of this while also looking after her son Rory, 13.
She now has 95 per cent movement and sensitivity in her right hand, and 75 per cent in her left — far more than the goal she was originally given of a maximum of 75 per cent in each hand.
‘Last month, I managed to tear open a salt sachet — the first time I have managed that in years,’ she says. It was incredible.
“The zips on dresses and the buttons at their backs are my biggest problems today. It’s important to me to be able see my actions. A button requires a lot more pushing, pulling and twisting than most people think.
“Sometimes I had to ask my taxi driver to remove the top for me when i came home. Or else I would have to wear the dress,” she joked.
Corinne suffered severe sepsis that left her with broken legs and hands in 2013. Sepsis is when the immune system reacts too strongly to infection, in this case pneumonia. This causes severe pain and starvation of the body’s limbs.
After becoming a quadruple amputee, she had to learn how to handle the many tasks of daily life with the prosthetic legs and stumps on her wrists.

Corinne’s transplant surgery was three years ago. She has been receiving intense daily physiotherapy up to 4 hours per day since then to learn the complex hand movements which are second to none to her.
Rory was four years old when she was single mom. Even the most basic movements were difficult for her. “Everything had to have been clenched between mine stumps,” she says.
She was given a bionic left hand which picked up signals from her brain — enabling her to point a finger or clench her fist, for example.
This made Corinne’s life much easier. She could put on makeup and go to work, but it was difficult to wear and it didn’t allow for any touch-screen functions.
She was unable to hold Rory’s little hands or move his hair. Mother and son were not able to show affection through these simple gestures of parent love.
In 2014 she became the UK’s first double-hand transplant patient. She had contacted Professor Simon Kay (a Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust consultant plastic surgeon) to get on the wait list.
Professor Kay heads the UK’s only hand-transplant unit. In 2012, she performed the first successful hand transplant on Mark Cahill (a West Yorkshire ex-pub landlord).
Not only did the hand transform his own life — Mark had lost the use of his right hand as a result of gout — but in 2016 he was able to keep his wife alive, as his donated hand enabled him to perform chest compressions when she stopped breathing following a heart attack, he told his local newspaper afterwards.
Corinne had five additional years to wait for a match after she was accepted on the waiting lists. Her life-changing, double transplant finally happened in January 2019 and she was the sixth person to receive such pioneering surgery.
She confesses that she had previously experienced false alarms, and was therefore initially anxious and skeptical about the possibility of it actually happening.
“My next thoughts were: “Who was going to take care of my son Rory?” “How would I get from Glasgow to Leeds?”
Another legacy from her fight with sepsis was behind the five-year delay.

She received the news that her groundbreaking double-transplant could be performed in January 2019.
Corinne needed 25 blood transfusions to save her life. She had so many antibodies from her donated blood that it was difficult to locate donor donors.
It was also necessary to compare the skin textures, age, and sizes of all donated hands.
Corinne was not only faced with a biological struggle.
She also had to prove she had the mental strength for the surgery, and the commitment to do the necessary physiotherapy — which, as she found out, can mean years of repetitive daily exercises.
Her life would be complete without her taking anti-rejection medications.
Four times a year, the psychological evaluation of patients is done before they are accepted onto the waiting list. Nine in ten of the people who meet Professor Kay’s criteria don’t make the cut, and so they never get on to the waiting lists.
Professor Kay says that strict regulations are important because having new hands can be very different to an organ transplant which, in most cases, is life-saving. The hands of a transplant patient must not be painful. They are always there, and they should feel able to deal with it.
Professor Kay said, “Just as your face is behind your head, your hands are in front of you.” She added that you can use them to communicate and touch your face all day. . . In a variety of ways.
It is also possible that, despite taking anti-rejection drugs, the recipient’s body may reject the new hands — and patients must be deemed robust enough to cope with that.
Corinne was able to meet the stringent criteria. As a fundraiser, she had established Finding Your Feet as a charity for amputees. This demonstrated her determination to use her prosthetic hands as usual after surgery.
Four teams of nurses and surgeons performed her 12-hour-long surgery on January 6. It began by attaching the bone to one another with titanium screws. The surgery was guided using microscopes.

Since the operation, she’s taken part in a variety of adrenaline-fuelled activities — including zip-lining in Snowdonia and wing-walking on a biplane — to raise more than £10,000 for her charity
To stop blood flow to the site, Professor Kay used clamps with his surgical team. After that, they had two hours in which to fix the muscles, tendons and blood vessels before blood supply was restored.
After waking from surgery, Corinne’s hands were splinted and wrapped in bubble wrap — but she could glimpse her new fingers showing through. They were hers, she said. “They have never looked and felt strange to me.”
Corinne went home after three weeks. She began the daily routine for physiotherapy to improve her sensation and movement.
She was overexcited by the excitement. On one occasion, she spent three hours sorting out Rory’s toy cars, which — as the sensation was only just returning at the time — caused huge blisters on her hands and meant a trip to hospital.
She explains that she didn’t feel pain and didn’t realize it was wrong.
Infected wounds and other complications hampered progress for the first five month. This meant that she had to return to hospital more often. Slowly, however, her progress began to improve.
Corinne’s initial physiotherapy involved being encouraged to use her hands to brush and dry her hair, and to do her make-up — movements that had been so difficult with her stumps.
Within a few months, she was able to feel whether an object is sharp. Then she started feeling heat. Once, four months after surgery, she was handed a can of cola on a flight to London — and realised she could sense cold.
She says, “It is amazing what our hands are able to detect that helps us keep ourselves from danger.”
In the beginning, she spent as much time daily as four hours practicing her exercises. While she is watching TV, she still exercises her hand muscles by opening and closing clothes pegs. A wrist roller is also helpful for flexibility. She uses it every day.
Some oddities can still occur due to the nerve connection, and this may cause her to be unable recognize what she’s feeling.
“When I touch anything, I feel a little delay. I must stop to think about what I am feeling and then the sensation finally registers,” she said. “Or, I may have cut my finger on my little finger. But it is my index finger that feels the hurt. So I check the other finger to see if it was the source of the problem.
But she was assured by her doctor that eventually the nerve signals will be completely aligned.
While she can lift something off the floor to use her eyeliner brush, she confesses that she cannot hold onto a nail and then smash it with the other hand. However, I push myself to get there.
Corinne claims that no one notices anything different in her hands when she wears a long-sleeved shirt. Her hands look so well-matched and people often comment on her grip strength.
People often realize she is a new person only after she shares her story.
‘At the supermarket they were patient with my stumps at the check-out. They now think that my hands are fine and don’t mind if I take some time to load the bags, then they won’t be as patient when I pay.
The hand transplant is slightly different to other organ donor transplants because it only happens when a suitable donor has been identified.
Corinne does not forget the fact that her life would be so full if it wasn’t for the consent of her family to have her hand transplant.
Two weeks ago, she wrote a thank you letter to them. They have been in touch since then. She does not want to reveal any information out of respect for their privacy.
However, she says that they told her that their loss was due to her active fundraising and fund-raising efforts.
They touched my hands and tried to hold them, but it felt awkward. They acknowledged them. She adds.
Professor Kay states that asking the family for their consent is difficult and brave work. He suggests changes to the organ donor registry website, so people can let them know if they are willing to give limbs or any other parts.
This type of surgery would be offered to all who have lost the hands or arms as a result of an accident or burns, or septicaemia.
He says, “My goal is that this be a routine, standard operation.” He says that there is no registry for those who have lost their upper limbs. However, he believes the hand transplant can transform lives.
A register should be established to track how many UK citizens are affected by limb loss. It would be a confirmation of his belief in a rising number and will also measure the impact of transplants on those suffering.
‘Many people who have no hands slip into depression and all the isolation that goes with it — and that needn’t happen,’ he says.
“Patients say that they feel better when their limbs are replaced. The strength of their grip isn’t the issue. Instead, it’s about being able to hold hands with children or stroke someone’s faces.
‘Humans are the only animal that can point — but you need hands and fingers to do that.’
Corinne is able to now point and ruffle the hair of her son, but she admits that Rory at 13 has a tendency not to hold his mother’s hand.
Since the operation, she’s taken part in a variety of adrenaline-fuelled activities — including zip-lining in Snowdonia and wing-walking on a biplane — to raise more than £10,000 for her charity.
She was invited by the Queen to attend the State Opening of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood Palace in October. This was to acknowledge her charity work.
Her next ambition — as well as hoping to improve her cycling and skiing — is a fund-raising walk along the Inca trail in Peru, once such travel is allowed.
She says that she is on anti-rejection pills for the rest her life because she’s immunosuppressed.
“People force me to be careful, even though they triple jab me. However, I want to lead a normal life.