Mr. Hardison was referred to Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez, of NYU Langone Medical Center for consideration of facial transplantation. The patient, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison, is still undergoing physical therapy at the hospital but plans to return home to Senatobia, Mississippi, in time for Thanksgiving.
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Eventually a church friend of his wrote to Rodriguez, who had performed a 2012 face transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
Face transplants have become increasingly common since the first, partial face transplant was carried out by doctors in France in 2005 on a woman who had been mauled by her dog.
“It’s mine”, Hardison told NY magazine of his new face, in an article that hits newsstands Monday about his transformation.
The transplant covers his skull, reaching over his face and down to his collarbones in front, and down far enough in back that it leaves only a tiny patch of his own hair at the bottom.
Three months on from the million dollar procedure, Mr Hardison, a father of five, is healing nicely, although he will need to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life to stop his body’s immune system from fighting the transplant.
That suddenly happened in August, when David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old award-winning BMX cyclist who lived in Brooklyn, died in a road accident. “I could see just a little bit”. A variety of surgeries doctors tried to help him.
Rodriguez also said it was the most facial tissue that had been transplanted, stressing that removing all Hardison’s damaged tissue was vital to making the results as normal as possible.
“This is not an operation for everyone, it’s for very courageous individuals”, he told a news conference. A native of the Columbus, Ohio, area, he had signed up to donate organs. Also, Hardison’s jugular face is not a flawless match for Rodebaugh’s.
Now, three months later, the lower part of his face remains swollen, but Rodriguez said that will go away in a few months.
In another room, a second team worked on Hardison for about eight hours to cut away a decade’s worth of scar tissue, built up from dozens of reconstructive surgeries.
Eventually, “a casual observer will not notice anything that is odd” in Hardison’s new face, which will blend features of his original face and the donor’s, Rodriguez said.
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The final step involved attaching Rodebaugh’s face to Hardison, including screwing on the bones of the nose and chin as well as delicate surgery to make sure the nerves of the eyelids and other critical facial functions would be preserved.
