Firefighter gets world's most extensive face transplant

A volunteer firefighter from Mississippi whose face was badly burned during a home fire rescue was revealed on Monday (November 16) to be the recipient of the world's most extensive face transplant.

After a 26-hour surgery at New York University's Langone Medical Centre in August, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison is living with the face of 26-year-old David Rodebaugh, a BMX extreme bicycling enthusiast from Brooklyn who was pronounced brain dead after a cycling accident.

As a result, for the first time since that raging fire in Senatobia, Mississippi in 2001, Hardison can blink and even sleep with his eyes closed - key steps to sparing his blue eyes from blindness that previously seemed all but inevitable, said Dr Eduardo Rodriguez, a plastic surgeon at NYU.

Simultaneous surgeries took place with Hardison on one operating table while Rodebaugh was on the other. The 150-person medical team, led by Rodriguez, had practiced for a full year to get it right.

"The fact that we were able to perform this and the patient was able to come out of the operating room safely is a very important historic event. In addition, the amount of tissue that was transplanted in Patrick's face had not been transplanted before.

“It's a big risk that we take and a risk that the patients understand... But now we've proven that the ability to transplant the face has advanced and likely gone, it's advanced more than the science of immunosuppression.

“So this is here to stay, it will not go away and we can do this safer and the results of these patients will be far better," Rodriguez said.

The team slit the skin at the back of the donor's head, peeling each side forward with key pieces of bone attached at the chin, nose and cheekbone and then precisely draped it, like Batman's cowl, onto Hardison's head.

"Everything has to be perfectly positioned," Rodriguez told Reuters, including the bones, muscles, ear canals, lips and nerves.

NYU, which will pay for the estimated $1 million surgery, took the case after a firefighter buddy reached out on behalf of Hardison, whose own children were initially terrified of their father's disfigured face.

Proof of the surgery's success was obvious after a medical team took Hardison shopping for new clothes at Macy's this fall, and no one in the store gave him a second look, Rodriguez said.

Rodebaugh's mother, who gave permission for the transplant, noting her son was an unexpected gift after she had been told she could not conceive a child, recently was shown a photograph of the surgical results.

"Patrick is beautiful," she told the medical team.

Hardison in a statement thanked his donor's family, saying, "I hope they see in me the goodness of their decision."