After suffering severe burns, firefighter receives new face and scalp in historic transplant

A slide showing Patrick Hardison before his face was burned, after his face was burned, and after his face transplant.

(Image credit: YouTube.com/Reuters)

published 17 November 2015

Patrick Hardison's life changed in 2001, when the Mississippi volunteer firefighter's face was burned off during an intense blaze. It changed again this August, when he received the world's most extensive face transplant.

The surgery at New York University Langone Medical Center took 26 hours, and once it was over, the 41-year-old had the full scalp and face with ears, nose, lips, and upper and lower eyelids, of a 26-year-old man named David Rodebaugh, who was pronounced brain dead after a BMX cycling accident, Reuters reports. Before, Hardison was unable to blink or close his eyes, which ultimately would have caused him to go blind.

It took a medical team of 150 people, led by Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, to perform the surgery. "The amount of tissue that was transplanted from Patrick's face had not been transplanted before," Rodriguez said. "We feel as a team, as a group, that it is absolutely essential to remove all of the scars and get down to healthy tissue in order for a patient to be normal, and being normal is defined by normal function and normal appearance, so it's a big risk that we take, a risk that the patients understand."

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The team practiced the surgery for a year, and knew that "everything," including the bones, muscles, ear canals, lips, and nerves, had to be "perfectly positioned," Rodriguez told Reuters. A friend of Hardison's approached the hospital, and said that Hardison's children were scared of their father's appearance; NYU agreed to take his case and pay for the estimated $1 million surgery. Rodebaugh's mother gave permission for the transplant, and after seeing the results of the surgery, declared that Hardison looked "beautiful." In a statement, Hardison thanked the family, saying: "I hope they see in me the goodness of their decision." Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.