Burned firefighter gets face makeover
‘It was most extensive face transplant ever’
NEW YORK: A volunteer firefighter badly burned in a 2001 blaze has received the most extensive face transplant ever, covering his skull and much of his neck, a New York hospital announced.
The surgery took place in August at the NYU Langone Medical Centre. The patient, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison, is still undergoing physical therapy at the hospital but plans to return home to Senatobia, Mississippi, in time for Thanksgiving next week.
The surgery has paved the way for him to regain normal vision and, in an interview last week, he said that it will let him accomplish a major goal: “I’ll start driving again.”
More than two dozen face transplants have been performed worldwide since the first one in France in 2005. Dr Eduardo Rodriguez, who led the surgical team that carried out Mr Hardison’s transplant and recently wrote a review on the task, said Mr Hardison’s is by far the most extensive performed successfully in terms of the amount of tissue transferred.
The transplant extends from the top of the head, over Mr Hardison’s skull and down to the collarbones in front; in the back, it reaches far enough down that only a tiny patch of Mr Hardison’s original hair remains — its color matched by the dark blond hair growing on his new scalp. The transplant includes both ears.
It’s “a historic achievement”, said Dr Amir Dorafshar, co-director of the face transplant programme at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the operation. “This type of treatment option will potentially revolutionise the care of patients with severe facial burn injuries.”
The surgery began on Aug 14 and lasted 26 hours. It left no scars on Mr Hardison’s new face because the seam of the transplanted tissue runs down the back of his skull. The donor was 26-year-old New York artist and competitive bicyclist David P Rodebaugh. He died of injuries from a biking accident on a Brooklyn street.
Mr Hardison was burned on Sept 5, 2001, in Senatobia in northwestern Mississippi. A 27-year-old father of three at the time who’d served for seven years as a volunteer firefighter, he entered a burning house to search for a woman. The roof collapsed, giving him third-degree burns on his head, neck and upper torso.
He spent about two months at a burns centre in Memphis, Tennessee. Doctors used a layer of skin from his legs to cover his wounded head, but he had lost his ears, lips, most of his nose and virtually all of his eyelid tissue.
Because he could not blink, doctors used skin grafts to reinforce what remained of his eyelids and sewed them nearly shut to protect his eyes. That left him with only pinhole vision. “I was almost totally blind,” he recalled. “I could see just a little bit.”
His face was “one huge scar,” Dr Rodriguez said. Mr Hardison still went to baseball games and did other things outside, although people stared. He playfully told curious children that he had fought a bear. Still, he said, life was hard. He endured 71 operations.
Eventually a church friend of his wrote to Dr Rodriguez, who had performed a 2012 face transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Centre. The doctor said he would try to help and, in August 2014, Mr Hardison was placed on a waiting list.
“We were looking for the ideal donor,” one who matched Mr Hardison on biological traits to minimise the risk of his body’s rejecting the new tissue, as well as things such as skin and hair colour, said Dr Rodriguez, who by then had moved to NYU Langone.
A year later, Rodebaugh was identified as a potential donor by LiveOnNY, the nonprofit organisation that seeks transplant organs and tissue in the New York City area. He was a native of Columbus, Ohio, and had signed up to donate organs. His mother gave permission to use his face, noting that Rodebaugh had always wanted to be a firefighter, said LiveOnNY President Helen Irving.
The hospital paid for the transplant operation, which included attaching four bone segments to Mr Hardison’s skull as anchors to prevent the face from drooping.
Now, three months later, the lower part of his face remains swollen, but Dr Rodriguez said that will go away in a few months. With his new eyelids and more surgery, he’s expected to regain a normal field of vision for the first time in more than a decade.