- It hasn’t worked in the past, but this time it did.
Since falling asleep at the wheel, Joe Dimeo, 20 at the time, has not been able to smile for two years. After his accident, a passerby pulled him out of his car before it exploded.
Dimeo had third-degree burns over 80% of his body and no eyelids, ears, or all of his fingers. Along with that he had severe scarring on his face and neck leaving him with limited range of motion.
The scars even partially covered his eyes.
That was until Wednesday when doctors at NYU Langone Medical Center announced that after a rough 23 hours of surgery, the now-22-year-old is the first and only successful face and hands transplant.
“He’s the most highly motivated patient I’ve ever met,” Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez the head of the team that completed the unprecedented surgery said. The surgery actually took place last August.
The doctors chose to wait on calling it a success until after the transplants weren’t rejected. This surgery for both hand and face transplant has only been attempted twice before and wasn’t successful either time.
“There have been over a hundred hand transplants performed successfully, and close to 50 face transplants,” Rodriguez said. “So fundamentally there was no reason why they couldn’t occur together, successfully.”
“We needed to avoid infection, we needed to have this operation occur as fast as possible, we had to be very selective with the donor, and we had to implement every state of the art technology that would ensure complete success of Joe’s operation, and that’s exactly what we did.”
“Joe is healthy, he’s young, he’s strong, he loves to exercise, he eats healthy, and he had that one special element which is going to be required for this operation,” Rodriguez said, “A high level of motivation. And he had a tremendous sense of hope.”
The hands and facial tissue of a dying donor (for his hands and face transplant) were carefully removed and replaced with 3D printed prosthetics. There were 80 people within six surgical teams and two adjoining operating rooms that did this operation.
To see the rest of this story, read Man Receives First Successful Hands and Face Transplant: Part Two.