‘Normal dad’ marks 1-yr. post-transplant

HE’S READY to face the future.

A year after receiving a rare face transplant, Patrick Hardison is getting used to the man he sees in the mirror.

“I get on up in the morning, take a shower and get ready to start my day,” said the 42-year-old father of five, a former Mississippi firefighter horrifically burned in the line of duty 15 years ago.

“I’m just a normal dad, and they don’t touch my face and say, ‘Oh my God.’ They don’t think anything about it,” Hardison told the Daily News. “Most kids when they touch their parents’ face, they don’t think anything about it. It’s part of me and it’s who I am.”

Hardison will get his closeup Wednesday when he and his doctors show off his new smile and update his progress at a news conference at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, where the groundbreaking procedure was performed. The patient and his doctor, Eduardo Rodriguez, the hospital’s chairman of plastic surgery, said Hardison has conquered the biggest hurdle — 12 months without rejection.

“He’s been getting busy living,” Rodriguez said. “He has missed out on that for a large number of years.”

Hardison’s odyssey began Sept. 5, 2001, when the Senatobia, Miss., volunteer firefighter (photo) became trapped while fighting a mobile home blaze that melted his mask and burned his face.

He has survived more than 70 surgeries that involved grafts from his leg to his face — and even got back to work at his tire shop business. Disfigured, he became addicted to painkillers. Then, 14 years after the fire, doctors recommended the transplant while forewarning it had only a 50 % success rate.

Hardison’s new face came from David Rodebaugh, 27, a Brooklyn man who died in a bicycle accident.

Doctors told him that some facial transplant patients don’t survive. But he pressed on. Recently, Hardison started picking up old routines, like driving his children to school.

“There’s nothing that I can’t do,” Hardison said. “I went to Disney World with the kids and I got in the pool.”

He misses firefighting, but recognizes that’s the one thing he can’t pursue anymore.

“I can’t take a chance of something happening. I would love to. It’ll always be there. I hear a siren here in New York and I look out the window, just to see what’s going on.

“Back home I go to the firehouse to drink coffee. They get a call. I have to stop myself. No, not this time. That’ll never die.”