Augusta, Georgia (CNN) -- Jeff Kepner's new hands slump on the table, like ill-fitting, flesh-colored anchors fused to his arms.
Hashmark scars line his lower arm. His right index finger stubbornly curls while the rest lie straight.
Kepner fidgets in his seat and strains his neck to check the clock hanging on the wall, to see when today's therapy session is over.
No one can say exactly when Kepner's hand therapy will end.
More than a year after becoming the first person to receive a double hand transplant in the United States, Kepner's new hands jut from his arms like foreign objects that he cannot control.
"They're heavy," he said flatly.
Kepner's surgery last May at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania generated headlines.
This week, surgeons at the Jewish Hospital Hand Care Center in Louisville, Kentucky, performed a 17-hour operation, the third double hand transplant in the United States.
That patient, Dr. Richard Edwards, a chiropractor, was injured in a burning truck in 2006. The Edmond, Oklahoma, man suffered severe burns on his face, back, arms and lost function of his hands.
Edwards' wife, Laura, reached out to Kepner's wife, Valarie, on Facebook after Kepner's transplant in May 2009. CNN
