‘Daddy, you're so handsome,' this was the seal of approval for America's first recipient of a full face transplant, Dallas Wiens, from his 4-year-old daughter.
“To her, I'm still Daddy. That in itself is an amazing thing,” Mr. Wiens, whose face got disfigured in a horrific electrical accident in 2008, told reporters here on Monday.
A crucial moment came last Tuesday, when his daughter Scarlette arrived in Boston and saw his new face for the first time. Mr. Wiens had to say her name twice, before she recognised his voice and ran over to him and asked him to pick her up, Boston Globe reported.
“I started crying,” he said. Later, Scarlette commented that he was “so handsome”.
His injury happened in November 2008 when Mr. Wiens, now 26, was painting his church as a volunteer: His head got too close to a high-voltage power line, and he lost almost his entire face from the burns.
For 90 days, doctors kept him in a medically induced coma while they performed surgeries and he breathed through a ventilator. Many people did not think he would make it out of the intensive care unit, said Dr Jeffrey Janis of Parkland Hospital and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, who has treated him from the time of his accident.
“I started at the edge and worked my way in,” said Mr. Wiens, who is blind from the accident. “I had a nose, I had eyelids, and I had lips. I was amazed.”
In a 15-hour procedure in mid-March, doctors gave Mr. Wiens a donor forehead, nasal structure, nose, lips and facial skin.
They also transplanted underlying muscles and nerves that will allow Mr. Wiens to have sensation and movement in his face.
Mr. Wiens is impressed by how his new face, from an anonymous donor, is gradually becoming part of him. He was lucky to find a match, doctors said, because previous skin grafts he had using donor tissue primed his immune system, making it more likely it would reject subsequent donor tissue.
“When I woke up, and I was able to feel I had features again — eyes and a nose and a mouth — I even said out loud that this could not be medically possible,” said Mr. Wiens. “But here I am today.”
Mr. Wiens said his face “feels natural, as if it has become my own”. He says he will also have surgery to remove excess tissue under his chin and to repair a slight droop around the right side of his lip.
Mr. Wiens' experience represents a new frontier for reconstructive surgery, CNN quoted Dr. Janis as saying.
