Dallas Wiens recalls waking up after his groundbreaking surgery in March and asking a nurse if he could touch his new face. When told he could, he gently explored his transplanted eyelids, nose, and mouth — all from an anonymous donor.
“I said out loud that this should not be medically possible — because it doesn’t seem like it should be,” Wiens told reporters in Boston before returning home to Texas. “But here I am today.”
At 26, Wiens is the first person in the U.S. to receive a full-face transplant and only the third in the world. His appearance today is unrecognizable compared to Nov. 13, 2008, when a tragic accident destroyed his facial features and left him blind. While painting a church from a cherry-picker crane, he brushed against a high-voltage power line, suffering extensive burns.
Before the transplant, surgeons used skin from other parts of his body to cover the wounds, leaving his face almost featureless and a hole in his throat for breathing. Now, Wiens has a fully formed face from mid-scalp to neck, complete with a nose he can breathe and smell through, a goatee, and a full head of hair. His mouth still has a slight droop on one side, and his voice is slurred, but doctors expect these to improve as nerves connect with the donor tissue.
Last week, his 4-year-old daughter, Scarlette, saw his new face for the first time. “She was amazed,” Wiens said. “She said, ‘Daddy, you’re so handsome.’ To her, I’m still Daddy. That alone is an amazing gift.”
Wiens will need lifelong immune-suppressing medication, which raises risks of infection and cancer, but he accepted it for the chance to “start over again.” He hopes to attend college and is working on a novel.
Face transplants have been rare, but the procedure may become more common. Since Wiens’ operation, surgeons at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have performed another full-face transplant on Mitch Hunter, an Indiana man injured by a power line. Charla Nash, mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009, is awaiting a donor for a face and hand transplant.
With a $3.4 million Defense Department grant, Brigham and Women’s plans to conduct six to eight transplants to refine best practices. Worldwide, only about a dozen full or partial face transplants have been performed, with prior cases in Spain, China, and Cleveland, where the U.S. first performed a partial transplant in 2009 on Connie Culp.
