This is pretty neat! I am praying for the success!

BALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- Nick Anderson's arm is paralyzed and without feeling in places after a car accident nearly a year ago that also took one of his legs.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital hope a rare nerve implant Thursday from the 19-year-old's mother will help restore use of his left hand.

"If they had a way of cutting off my arm and putting it on him, I would have done that," said Frankie Anderson, 40, who had nerve segments removed Tuesday from each arm and leg. She will have permanent numbness in small patches on each elbow and foot, doctors said.

Nick Anderson's left arm no longer has an elbow joint, and two of the three main nerves have been severed.

If the nerve segments are transplanted successfully, doctors will know in three to four months if the graft has taken hold, and in a year to 18 months if use of the arm has been regained, said Dr. Allan Belzberg, who will perform the surgery.

Such surgeries are rare, but they are increasing, and raising hopes of saving limbs that previously would have been lost. Donations from cadavers are more common.

Dr. Susan McKinnon performed the first live donor surgery in 1993 at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, and has since performed seven or eight nerve transplants, with some function restored in most cases, Belzberg said.

Since then, surgeons in Houston also transplanted nerves in 2000 from a mother to her 8-month-old son, who had the nerves in his left shoulder torn during birth. In January, a Connecticut man had nerves from his mother implanted at Monmouth Medical Center in New Jersey to help reverse paralysis of his right arm.

In some cases, grafts can be taken from other parts of the body, but in Anderson's case, the loss of his leg meant there wasn't enough donor nerve to use, Belzberg said.

Anderson also will need to take anti-rejection drugs to prevent his body from rejecting the transplanted nerves.

But the 19-year-old had a brain tumor removed two years ago, and Belzberg said there were concerns that the immunosuppressant drugs might affect his ability to fight off a recurrence of the tumor.

Anderson will not have to take the anti-rejection drugs permanently because the donated nerves act only as a scaffold, or conduit, on which his own nerve cells will grow. Once they have overgrown the donated nerve cells, the drugs can be stopped and his body will remove the foreign, donated nerve cells, Belzberg said.

Family members say they have been told the surgery has a 50 percent chance of success.