An 8-year-old Baltimore boy who lost his hands and feet to infection when he was 2 will now know what it’s like to be able to pet a dog, throw a football or climb on the swing set at school.

Zion Harvey was given the world’s first double hand transplant at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

A team of 40 doctors, nurses and reconstruction specalists were guided by Dr. L. Scott Levin, the chair of orthopedic surgery at Penn Medicine (the medical school for the University of Pennsylvania).

“We know what we have to do today,” Dr. L. Scott Levin told his troops before the 10-hour operation began. “I know everybody assembled here has a commitment to this patient and making this a reality for this little boy. We can have complications. We can fail. We can have trouble. But we’re not planning on it.”

Zion had already survived a kidney transplant and mastered using prosthetic legs.

“It was Zion’s decision,” thie boy’s mother Pattie Ray told the Baltimore Sun. “If he wanted them we were going to get them. If he didn’t we weren’t.”

Zion informed his mother that because he now had hands, he wants a puppy and wants to play football.