Quadruple Amputee Due For Double Army Transplant

Retired Marine Awaits Double Arm Transplant
The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va.
by Kristin Davis
Mar 15, 2016

For more than two months after the blast, Peck lay in a medically induced coma at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He'd endured more than two dozen surgeries; three times, his heart had stopped. An infection had nearly killed him.

In the evenings, in the echoes of the expansive home built and equipped for him, retired Marine Sgt. John Peck imagines a new life.

He wills the phone to ring. Perhaps this is it, he thinks when it finally does. The call from the Boston hospital that will set it all into motion.

Peck was clearing the way for his fellow Marines while on patrol in Afghanistan in May 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device. The blast claimed both of his legs and part of his right arm. Later, as he fought a virulent infection, doctors took his left arm to spare his life.

Peck, a hulking, 6-foot-tall, 200-pound Marine, had become a quadruple amputee at age 24.

It was like somebody hit the pause button on his life. Now he waits for a double arm transplant from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital in the hope that it will start again.

From the sun deck of his home at the Estates of Chancellorsville where he has learned to live in relative independence, he lists in order all he intends to accomplish when that day finally comes.

They are big dreams, he concedes, with an unlikely chance of total success.

He shrugs.

"I've had worse odds." read more here