Our touching reunion
The incredible meeting of face donor’s widow and gun victim
A WIDOW wept as she stroked her late husband’s face 16 months after it was transplanted on to a stranger.
Lilly Ross touched Andy Sandness’s new skin after his successful surgery.
He had spent ten years living as a virtual recluse after much of his face had been shot off. Mrs Ross agreed to donate the face of her former high-school sweetheart Calen Ross, who took his own life in June last year. And she cried as she embraced Mr Sandness, 32, during the meeting at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where the procedure took place.
Mrs Ross, who is in her early 20s, admitted she had fretted beforehand that it would remind her of her husband. But without Mr Ross’s eyes or strong cheek bones, she said she barely recognised the features – apart from the hairless gap in his chin.
‘That’s why he always grew his beard so long, so he could try to mesh it together on the chin,’ she said. Mr Sandness put a rifle below his head in 2006 in his native Wyoming and pulled the trigger, destroying his face.
The oilfield technician then withdrew from the outside world, ashamed of his injuries which left him with a quarter-sized mouth and a prosthetic nose which frequently fell off.
But following last year’s surgery, he said: ‘Now I’m just really spreading my wings and doing the things I missed out on – going out to restaurants and eating, going dancing.’
Mr Ross and Mr Sandness’s blood type, skin colour and facial structure were such a near-perfect match that the two men could have been cousins, surgeons said. Mrs Ross took her toddler Leonard to meet Mr Sandness. She had been pregnant when her husband died. She said one reason she agreed to meet was that she wanted Leonard to one day understand what his father did to help others. The youngster initially stared curiously at Mr Sandness, but later allowed him to pick him up.