Morbid Fact Du Jour for November 8, 2015

Today’s Melted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The third recipient of a full-face transplant, and the first American, was Dallas Wiens. In November 2008 the twenty-three-year-old Wiens was painting some structures on the roof of a Fort Worth, Texas, church when he accidentally steered his hydraulic lift into some power lines. The air around his head reportedly glowed blue for fifteen seconds, and the current running through his face melted it into a blank mask, one writer noted, not unlike “Mr. Potato-Head without the features.” In March 2011 Wiens got a replacement. The new face arrived in a blue cooler in a slurry of ice water; it was the size and thickness of medium pizza dough when unfurled.

Surgeons first hooked the donor face up to Wiens’s blood supply through his carotid arteries. This took some creative suturing since the donor had cigar-sized carotids, while Wiens’s vessels (which had atrophied) looked like drinking straws. The transplant team felt enormous relief when the face started to flush pink, as sign that it was taking blood. In all, the surgery ran seventeen hours, during which time Wiens’s new face smirked, winked, and grimaced as surgeons manipulated it to reattach various nerves and muscles. Afterward doctors rolled him into the ICU to see if Wiens would be able to smirk, wink, and grimace on his own.

When Wiens awoke, he felt his new, swollen face pressing down hard, like a lead mask. He could breathe only through a tube in his trachea. But all the discomfort seemed worth it a few days later. In a moment so mundane it’s poignant, he found he could finally smell food again. Lasagna. Touch sensation returned not long after, and he felt, really felt, his daughter’s kiss for the first time in years. Wiens even began dreaming of himself with his new face. These were moments the World War I masks, even the most artistic, could never replicate.

Before and After and After