41-year-old Firefighter Received The Most Successful Face Transplant In History

After 70 operations, the patient received the most successful face transplant in history, from scalp to the ear canals.

A team from the Langone Medical Center in New York, USA, has successfully completed the most complete and complex face transplant in medical history.

The patient we’ll be talking about today is a 41-year-old former firefighter  named Patrick Hardison who suffered severe burns to his face in September 2001 while trying to save a woman from a fire in Mississippi.

The surgery was performed on August 15, after a complex procedure that lasted 26 hours. The latter had recourse to the participation of more than 100 health professionals. Doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff were in fact headed by Doctor Eduardo D. Rodriguez.

After waiting for the patient to successfully pass all the stages of his recovery, the news was spread around the world, given the importance it has for the advancement of medicine.

The story

In 2001, Patrick Hardison, a volunteer firefighter from New York, suffered severe third degree burns to the face. This accident took place as he entered a burning building to rescue a woman he believed to be trapped in the fire.

The roof of the building collapsed on top of him. He then suffered serious injuries which plunged him, for many hours, to the verge of death.

Some time after the intervention of the firefighters, it turned out that the woman had never been in the building at the time of the fire. She was indeed just fishing.

Since this tragic event, the firefighter has had to undergo more than 70 surgeries. Not all of them had the success of the one that gave him hope a few months ago.

Thanks to Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, and his advanced surgical team, the patient received the largest face transplant ever performed, in terms of the amount of tissue transferred.

The surgery, estimated at one million dollars, allowed the grafting of various elements of the face such as:

• Scalp
• The ears and ear canals
• Chin bones
• The cheekbones
• The full nose
• The eyelids and the muscles that control them (before, humans could not fully close their eyes)

Doctor Rodriguez, chief surgeon of the operation, spoke about the operation, as follows:

After 90 days of convalescence, Patrick reacted very well to the transplant. When presenting his new face to the world, the hero put it this way:

The donor

This procedure, which took over a year to prepare, would not have been possible without donor David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old artist who died of brain death after a tragic bicycle accident on the Brooklyn Bridge. .

The transplant was also made possible thanks to the timely intervention of the non-profit association LiveOnNY. The latter is dedicated to the search for organ and tissue donors in the New York metropolitan area.

They contacted the Rodebaugh family, asking them to authorize the transplant of David’s organs, including that of his face.

According to the head of the operation, the wait for the transplant was very long because it was necessary to find the perfect donor.

He didn’t just have to have the same blood type and the same color of skin and hair. He also had to have a similar facial bone structure.

For all these reasons, but also because of the enormous cost of such an operation, hundreds of patients are waiting for the same transplant. They may never receive it.

Patrick Hardison’s surgery could not have taken place without the funds received by the NYU Langone Medical Center as part of a fellowship.

The hospital now hopes to be able to conduct other similar operations.

Since 2005, and the first face transplant performed in France, more than 20 people have received this surgery around the world. Unfortunately, 5 of them did not survive.