Firefighter undergoes successful full face transplant

Sucks that guy had to go through yet another face transplant. Tragic.

I don't mean to make a joke of the situation, and it's incredible that we have progressed medically speaking to be able to do something like this. This man now will have a chance to lead a much more normal life than he did with the severe burns, just on public perception of strangers. But I'll be damned if the far right of the first pic doesn't look a LOT like Sean Payton.

Unbelievable. Saw this on cbs news last night. He had a 50/50 shot at surviving the surgery.

wow!

and we complain of bullshite daily...

Interesting you post this. I attended a talk/presentation by surgeon who performed this operation (Dr. Rodriguez). He outlined more of the technical challenges involved in this relatively new procedure and in particular this case.

We have had the technical ability for many years to these types of surgeries. (we commonly perform free tissue transfer for reconstruction of head and neck defects, i.e. taking a leg bone and reconstructing jaw, tongue, etc.) but these are done by harvesting tissue from the same person needing the reconstruction.

Obviously a transplantation throws in a whole new level of difficulty as you have to deal with the possibility of rejection and failure of the transplant. They went through stringent FDA approval and cross matching prior to performing this surgery to minimize the rejection risk, which make sense. ... I mean if you have a kidney transplant and if it gets rejected, you go back on dialysis. If you have a face transplant fail... there not really much you can do to replace the transplant or really to salvage the face in general.

In the few of these that have been done, they often transplant not just the facial skin/nerves, but also underlying bone as well.

Given the relatively new procedure, it remains to be seen on long term follow-up/rejection of these facial transplants. I think we will continue to see advances made in transplantation medicine in general.


Anyway very interesting.

If I ever get burned that bad I'm just going to walk around public with a Kaine mask.

Sean Payton is first thing I thought. Face donor guy looks like Dirk Nowitzki.