Posted on 05/29/2015 10:29:38 AM PDT by windcliff
In an emotional get-together, a woman has met for the first time a man who received her late brother's face in a groundbreaking transplant.
Rebekah Aversano visited Richard Norris at his Virginia home and stroked his face — which once belonged to her 21-year-old brother Josh.
"Do you mind if I touch it?" Aversano asked during the emotional meeting filmed by "60 Minutes Australia'.
The family of Aversano had donated the face of Josh to Richard Norris, who had suffered severe facial disfigurement after accidentally shooting himself in 1997 when he was 22.
Norris, now 39, had undergone dozens of conventional operations to try to repair damage from the shooting accident but had limited success, leaving him depressed and suicidal.
In one of the most complex face transplants in history, a team at the University of Maryland medical centre took 36 hours in March 2012 to transplant teeth, a jaw, tongue muscles and nerves.
Joshua's mother, Gwen, told Canada's CTV News network the family knew the donation was the right thing to do.
"We can definitely see our son in him. Some of the facial features would definitely be our son, so we could see similarities, very much so", she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at hindustantimes.com ...
Life is complicated enough...... I certainly don’t want to look in the mirror and see someone else looking back at me for the rest of my life. Geez
I imagine that you’d get used to it. Unless they gave you Hillary’s face.
I have thought that as well other organ you never see this would be odd
Premise for a bad Travolta movie.
she is beautiful. would be strange to see a familiar face on another person....something Rod Serling might have produced.
How about a “shotgun face” staring back at ya?
The article says he accidentally shot himself in the face in 1997.
I’m wondering, though, is this is the same guy I remember reading about and seeing news stories about, who was trying to commit suicide along with a friend of his.
As I recall, it had something to do with their obsession with a heavy metal song or something. The first guy successfully blew his own head off, but the second took off most of the front of his head without hitting his brain, and manged to survive. I’m pretty sure the case I’m remembering occurred in the mid to late 90s, so I’m wondering if this his him.
In any event, it appears he’s turned his life around, and I’m glad the transplant has worked out for him.
Correction: In any event, if it is him, it appears he’s turned his life around. I’m glad the transplant has worked out for him.
//Norris was only 22 when his face ‘exploded’.
The story goes that he had arrived home after drinking and was arguing with his mother when he took a shotgun from his gun cabinet and told his mom he was going to shoot himself.
But when he went to place the gun down, it went off. //
Thanks. This is not the same guy I was thinking of, then.
It still seems like a stupid thing to do, though. I’m glad he has squared himself away and I hope he continues to do well.
That would be cruel. However, if they transplanted the thunder thighs and I suddenly started wearing pants suits and became smarmy, that would be the end of me.
I imagine that you’d get used to it. Unless they gave you Hillary’s face
Yeah, but you’d have to pull down your pants for anyone to see that!
Could be. That said, there have been many people who thought they’d kill themselves or somebody else with a shotgun and then only ended up blowing off their faces, either because the gun (which is heavy) shifted when they pulled the trigger or because they suddenly changed their minds.
We had a woman one place I lived who had had her face blown off by a rejected boyfriend who was trying to kill her but didn’t know how to use a shotgun. I think she may have been one of the earliest recipients of this surgery.
That said, they’ll be printing faces in no time at all, unless euthanasia prevents this from happening. They can already print tissue.
Euthanasia is going to seriously degrade the quality of medical research and medical care. Why invest money in helping or curing or restoring people when you can just kill them (or get them to consent to their own deaths)?
I remember the documentary.
He lived and is lower jaw and nose were gone, and his parents tried to sue Ozzie Osborne.
IIRC, at the end of the documentary, it said he finally finished himself off with some pills.
Sorry, they sued Judas Priest:
Sorry, it was a lawsuit against Judas Priest.
here’s the documentary:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104140/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Really, you took the words out of my mouth, but on the serious side, I did not think we had that technology to do this yet, interesting.
I don’t see how he would look much like her brother since the brother’s facial skin would be molded, nipped and tucked around the new guy’s facial structure. That would be like two people who bought the same fabric at the store and one made a pair of pants and the other made a shirt. The print, weight and color would be the same but that’s as far as it goes.
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