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Face transplant

Started by Ed, December 02, 2005, 04:17:14 AM

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Ed

I saw on the news that a French woman received the world's first face transplant last weekend.  She was mauled by a dog, in May, which left her disfugured and unable to eat and speak properly.  Doctors have grafted a pear shaped portion of a donor's face, from the chin to the bridge of the nose, including muscle tissue, and given the woman a new mouth and nose.

Up until now it has been considered unethical to perform transplants, unless the patient's condition is life threatening, although other patients around the world have receives scalp, ear and arm transplants.  Face transplants are something else, because they are key to personal identity.  This woman has suffered a loss of her identity and experienced difficulty in doing everyday things like eating and speaking, so it's not as if she's doing it for purely cosmetic reasons.  But how long will it be before cosmetic surgery addicts will demand new faces? 

How would it feel to see somebody walking around wearing the face of your recently deceased son or daughter? :o

Not something to enter into lightly, though - the patient will have to take anti rejection drugs for the rest of their life, resulting in immune system suppression, as well as an increased risk of cancer and kidney damage.

Thoughts? :scratch:
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

Geoff_N

It seems to be completely justified in this case.

It doesn't raise new issues for horror & thriller writers since the concept has been used many times.

On the other hand, if -- rather when,  -- they perfect cloning of body parts, whose face would you choose out of the catalogue in the drive-in cosmetic surgery of 2010? I mean if I chose Catherine Zeta-Jones could you ever drag me off the mirror... snogging 'my' face off?  :bleh: :bleh: :bleh:

Geoff

JoyceCarter

Quite a lot of people already have reservations about heart transplants, for exactly this same reason of feeling that it is the seat of a crucial part of personal identity.  I would imagine, though, that the visual element would make this even more open to objections - it would be a gut reaction, not thought through.  After all, natural resemblance can be upsetting when you're in the process of grieving for somebody: if your dear departed is a medium-height brown-eyed blond, suddenly the world seems to be full of them, and every glimpse is painful, being an instinctive hope disappointed.  Maybe there will be legislation - face transplants only to be done in cases of genuine medical need?

SharonBell

#3
Seems to me that the transplant process and the person's underlying bone structure would make it less likely that the recipient would be a dead ringer, so to speak, for the dearly departed. The drugs for all transplants pretty much make you into elephant man or woman immediately post-op and bone structure really determines how the skin is arranged. My guess is you wouldn't recognize the face without having some serious examination time, very much post-op.

"Be good and you'll be lonesome." Mark Twain

www.sharonbuchbinder.com

Walker

#4
That's a good point, Sharon. Faces are all made up of the same parts-- nose, eyes, lips, etc.-- but they look differently on everyone. I would imagine it's due to your reasoning, and as such, not likley that any two people would wear the same parts the same way.
"Lord, here comes the flood, we will say goodbye to flesh and blood. If, again, the seas are silent in any still alive, it'll be those who gave their island to survive. Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry."
Peter Gabriel.

JoyceCarter

You're absolutely right - I heard an item on the news when I was out in the car just now, when the surgeon who did the operation was reported as saying that the woman wouldn't look anything like the donor, for exactly the reason you've said.

Ed

#6
Ah, but have you ever seen a pic of that kid who blew his face off with a shotgun?  It was a suicide pact that went wrong - his friend successfully killed himself, but the other kid tilted his head upwards, laid the shotgun flat against his chest and pulled the trigger.  He lost his whole mouth, tongue, nose, most of his nasal passages and his eyes, complete with ocular orbits.

If surgeons ever wanted to reconstruct his face, wouldn't it be conceivable for them to graft both face and bone, thus making him look exactly like the donor? 

There was another case where a stunt man landed his motorbike from a jump so that the back wheel was on the ground and the front wheel was on the back of a truck - he smashed his face into the hub of the handlebars, leaving him without any facial features.  Same thing there - they could graft the whole lot - skin, muscle and underlying bone.

Geoff - the horror angle comes when the tissue is rejected, the skin goes black and sloths off, leaving the recipient a hundred times worse off than they were before :/
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]

JoyceCarter

Those are a pair of awful stories, Ed.  Hard to imagine trying to live in the state those two got themselves into.

I always remember a bit of a Reader's Digest I was reading in the dentist's once - a woman being horribly facially injured, and coming round at the scene of the accident to hear a bystander saying about her, 'Ugh, it's moving.'  Just think of being so unrecognizable as human that someone is moved to call you 'it'.  If I remember rightly, she ended up marrying the plastic surgeon who rebuilt her face.

SharonBell

Here's some more tidbits re this tale. The woman signed a MOVIE DEAL before she had the surgery. And, do you know why she was mauled? Because she took an overdose and her poor dog was trying to WAKE HER UP!!! My concern at this point is for the dog (was it destroyed?), not this manipulative woman! >:(
"Be good and you'll be lonesome." Mark Twain

www.sharonbuchbinder.com

JoyceCarter


Ed

OMG - that's never right.  I bet it was a young dog.  A couple of years back, I remember seeing a story about a kid whose arm was paralysed and his pet dog chewed off and ate three of his fingers while he slept :scratch:  It wasn't put down.  Personally, I wouldn't want a dog in the same house as me looking at me like I was dinner :huh:

In her case, they should put her and the dog to sleep, IMO.
Planning is an unnatural process - it is much more fun to do something.  The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression. [Sir John Harvey-Jones]