Face transplant to a fire fighter

Patrick Hardison was a firefighter who was disfigured while trying to save a woman from a fire in 2001. The roof gave way and hit him, and the fire left him with terrible burns on his face, head, neck and upper body, completely disfiguring him. He lost his eyelids, ears, lips, most of his nose and all his hair, including his eyebrows. A few days later not even his mother could recognise him.

In the following years he underwent more than 70 reconstructive operations, but for 14 years he had to live with pain and with the stares of strangers.

In August 2015, however, a team of doctors performed a face transplant, the most extensive ever carried out in the world up to then, including the scalp, ears and working eyelids, at NYU Langone medical center in New York. The donor was David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old artist and cyclist who died in a bike accident in Brooklyn. His mother, who gave consent, said her son had always dreamed of being a firefighter.

The transplant

The firefighter had to wait more than a year for a suitable donor and in August, after 26 hours in the operating theatre and with a team of over 100 people, he finally received a new face. As well as the facial skin and scalp, he received the ears with the ear canals, the eyelids, the whole nose and parts of the chin and cheekbones.

The survival rate for the operation was 50%, but the man had wanted it badly.

Hardison will have to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life and be very careful about infections that could develop.

Hardison says this face has given him his life back and that now he can walk down the street without children crying when they see him, and for this he thanks all the doctors.

The years after

A year after the operation his body had shown no signs of rejection. Hardison could see properly again, eat, drive and swim in a pool for the first time in 15 years; he had hair and went to the gym. “Now I’m just the average guy walking down the street,” he said.

The first face transplants

The first partial face transplant on a living person was carried out in France in November 2005, at Amiens University Hospital, on Isabelle Dinoire: she received a nose, lips and chin. The first full face transplant was performed in Spain, in Barcelona, in 2010.

In 2006 in China a partial face transplant was performed on Li Guoxing, a shepherd disfigured by a bear, but the patient died in 2008 after abandoning his anti-rejection drugs in favour of herbal remedies.

Today around 50 successful face transplants have been performed worldwide.

Sources

• NYU Langone Health, Recipient of groundbreaking face transplant one year later
• CBS News, One year after face transplant, ex-firefighter sees new “normal”
• NBC New York, A Year After Historic Face Transplant, Burned Firefighter Can Swim and Drive
• Action News 5, Firefighter’s life back to normal after successful face transplant
• Wikipedia, Face transplant