A volunteer firefighter who suffered devastating burns on duty in 2001 has just received the most extensive facial transplant ever performed.
In a press release on Monday, NYU Langone Medical Center announced that reconstructive surgeon Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez led the surgical team to give 41-year-old Patrick Hardison a new face. The doctors had warned Hardison that he had only a 50-50 chance of surviving the risky surgery, according to ABC.
Hardison was 27 in September 2001 when he rushed into a burning home to save a woman believed to be trapped inside. The ceiling of the house collapsed on him and his mask melted onto his face, ABC reported. When he escaped from the fire, he was unrecognizable even to the colleagues who worked to save him. The fire had taken his entire face along with his scalp, ears, eyelids, nose, and lips.
He had returned home after spending 63 days at the hospital recovering from his burns, but even after 70 reconstructive surgeries over the following decade, his disfigurement remained extreme. Hardison was also losing his vision and risked going blind because he had no eyelids.
In 2012, he began to consider a face transplant, and sent his records to Dr. Rodriguez. As New York Magazine reported, Rodriguez's previous transplant experience includes transplanting a face from one live monkey onto another, as well as an extensive surgery replacing the face, jaws, teeth, and tongue of a man whose face had been shot off.
After carefully vetting Hardison for the surgery and making sure he fully understood all the physical and psychological risks it entailed, Rodriguez and his team set about trying to find the right donor.
They had very specific requirements. In addition to a match with skin color and hair color, Rodriguez told ABC:
The blood type obviously has to match. We didn't want any viruses. We're not looking for any patient that has significant exposures, I.V. drug use and the like. We also look at tattoos, not so much that tattoos are bad, but individuals that get numerous tattoos, we're concerned about contamination of any form. We're looking for a patient that has not had any malignancy and no facial injuries. We're looking at skeletal measurements we want them to match skeletally. We look at specific distances of their eyes or nose or mouth, the lips, so we're very specific in a face transplant.
In July 2015, a donor match emerged after a 26-year-old bike messenger and BMX racer named David Rodebaugh was killed in a biking accident in Brooklyn. His donation was facilitated by the organ procurement organization LiveOnNY.
On August 14, the surgical team at NYU worked for 26 hours to remove Rodebaugh's face and attach it, blood-vessel-by-blood-vessel, to Hardison.
Since doctors developed the technology to transplant faces, 30 patients have received the surgery so far. As Rodriguez told ABC, three to five of them died after their bodies rejected the transplant. Three months after his surgery, however, Hardison's body seems to be accepting his new face.
"In most patients that I've received a face transplant they have an acute rejection episode commonly within 30 to 90 days," Rodriguez said. "In Pat's case we've not seen an acute rejection episode. So I'm a little concerned of what that will look like. We hope that we won't experience it."
As for Hardison, who remains in New York while he recovers from the surgery, going out in public with his new face proved to be a huge milestone.
"I went to Macy's to get clothes and I was just another guy, nobody is pointing or staring. I wasn't scaring any kids," he said. "It’s just-- it’s very emotional, to have that."
