Face Transplantation

Giving someone a face is not cosmetic surgery in extremis nor is it exploitative. For the right patient, and despite the risks, it is a necessity - Dr. Daniel Alam

Face Transplantation
Face Transplantation

image by: Dr. Jennifer Walden

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How to Adapt to Your Face Transplant

Just last month, Carmen Blandin had a remarkable dream. In it she saw, for the first time, not her old face in the mirror—the one she had for the first 38 years of her life—but the new face she received in a transplant three years ago. “I actually saw me with my new face,” she says. “Finally.” In the dream, she was smiling. Carmen became severely disfigured one evening in 2007, at her home in rural Vermont, when her estranged husband doused her with industrial strength lye while she lay in bed. She still identifies more with her original face, she says, but that doesn’t mean she wants it back.

That Carmen has, in some measure, moved on from her old identity by eschewing any desire…

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 How to Adapt to Your Face Transplant

What’s more, it turns out that getting a new face may be less difficult psychologically than adapting to new hands, say surgeons and psychologists who have worked with both kinds of patients. One critical difference is that your hands are within sight throughout the day, while your face is only visible with a mirror.

8 things to know about face transplants

Face transplant recipients could be imbued with many post-operative challenges including both physical and psychological complications. Controversy surrounding the surgery stems from donors being taken off life support and the risks involved with the complicated procedure as the lives of recipients' are not technically at-risk at the time of surgery.

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