Cleveland Clinic Team Outlines Details of First U.S. Face Transplant
Surgeons today described the first face transplant in the United States, a painstaking 22-hour operation to stitch most of a dead woman’s face onto a recipient so horribly disfigured she was willing to undergo the risky surgery in the hopes of being able to smile, smell, eat and breathe normally again — and go out in public without frightening children.
In a procedure done sometime in the past two weeks, the 30-member Cleveland Clinic team replaced about 80 percent of the patient’s face — essentially recreating the entire middle of her face including her lower eyelids, nose, cheeks, and upper jaw, along with supporting the bones, muscles, nerves and arteries. (continues)