Survivor gets a new face — and new life
Exchange came near end of extraordinary medical journey that revolved around two outdoorsmen
He’d been waiting for this day, and when his doctor handed him the mirror, Andy Sandness stared at his image and absorbed the enormity of the moment: He had a new face, one that had belonged to another man.
His father and his brother, joined by doctors and nurses at Mayo Clinic, watched him examine his features. He was starting to heal from one of the rarest surgeries in the world — a face transplant, the first at the medical centre. He had the nose, cheeks, mouth, lips, jaw, chin, even teeth of his donor.
“Far exceeded my expectations,” he scrawled in a notebook. “You don’t know how happy that makes us feel,” Dr Samir Mardin replied as he read the message, addressing the man who’d become his friend over the last decade.
Deadly decision
The exchange came near the end of an extraordinary medical journey that revolved around two outdoorsmen, both just 21 when they decided to kill themselves: Sandness survived but with a face almost destroyed by a gunshot. The other man died. Their paths wouldn’t converge for years, but when they did — in sideby-side operating rooms — one man’s tragedy offered hope the other would have a second chance at a normal life.
Two days before Christmas in 2006, a deeply depressed Andy Sandness put a rifle beneath his chin and pulled the trigger. He was treated at two hospitals, then transferred to Mayo Clinic, where he met facial reconstruction plastic surgeon Mardini.
Sandness had no nose or jaw. His mouth was shattered. Mardini and his team reconstructed his upper and lower jaw with bone, muscle and skin from the hip and a leg. They reconnected facial bones with titanium plates and screws.
Then in 2012, Mardini called. It looked like Mayo was going to launch a face transplant programme; Sandness might be an ideal patient.
Mayo’s medical team, which had rehearsed the surgery for three years with cadaver heads, gathered one June night to start a 56-hour marathon. It took 24 hours to procure the donor’s face, which involved taking bone, muscle, skin and nerves — and almost the same time to prepare Sandness. His face was rebuilt below his eyes, taking an additional 32 hours.