Face transplant recipient learns to smile again
25-year-old Texan the first person in the US to receive operation
Fort Worth, Texas (AP) Ten months after becoming the f irst person to get a full face transplant in the United States, a Fort Worth man marvels at recovering the ability of expression.
The progress of 25-yearold Dallas Wiens and the handful of other patients that have undergone the procedure i s helping to make the case that it should be more widely available.
“The ability to smile and to show emotion on my face, even unintentionally, is such a natural thing,” Wiens told the Dallas Morning News. “Having a new face has changed me dramatically.”
Wiens’ face was burned off in 2008 when his head
Dallas Wiens
touched a high-voltage power line while he was standing in an elevated cherry picker. He was also left blind and has not recovered his sight.
He underwent more than two dozen operations, but they left him with a featureless face. The transplant changed that.
“I don’t look much different than anybody else,” he said.
Wiens’ case, and those of two others, were the subject of a study published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The procedure can correct “severe deformities in a single operation” rather than years of reconstructive surgery, the study said.
The Department of Defence funded the transplants though a $3.4 million (Dh12.5 million) grant with the hope of offering the procedures to wounded soldiers.