James Maki, the second person in the US to receive a face transplant, has been telling his story in the hope that it will encourage more people to donate organs.
Susan Whitman, the widow of Maki’s donor, Joseph Helfgot who died after a heart transplant, also spoke to the press yesterday about patients waiting for transplants and how knowing how Maki has been helped has gone a long way to “taking the sting out” of her husband’s death.
Maki received his new face at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. In an interview earlier this week with The Boston Globe, the 59-year old Massachusetts man described how he asked to see his face in a mirror only four days after the operation, which took place on April 9.
He told his lead surgeon Dr. Bohdan Pomahac that he couldn’t believe how close he looked to the way he looked before.
Maki was badly disfigured in 2005 when he fell onto an electrified rail in a subway station in Boston. He said people would ridicule and stare at him and he never gave up wanting an operation, even though it would be risky, because he just wanted a “normal life”.
During the brief press conference he said he hoped this would give him “a chance to start fresh”.
Whitman said she was “elated that someone else can get a chance”.
An online photo gallery shows Maki’s face before and after the operation (some of the images are quite graphic).
The accompanying text describes how the injury nearly killed Maki and that the surgeon who treated him after the accident said he had “lost his nose, upper lip, parts of his cheeks, the roof of his mouth as well as underlying muscle, bone and nerves”.
Maki is the second person in the US to receive a face transplant. The first was Connie Culp, who revealed her story earlier this year, following a transplant operation at the Cleveland Clinic in December 2008. She had lost most of the midsection of her face from a gunshot in 2004.
Source: The Boston Globe.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD