At the beginning of this year, the Frenchman Jerome Hamon was given his third face.
According to a statement released by the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris, which is where the transplant process was carried out, the transplant procedure started in the early afternoon on January 15 and continued until the following morning. However, before anything further could be done, Hamon had to have every drop of blood in his body restored. In order for surgeons to eliminate antibodies that may have led to the patient’s body rejecting the face transplant, a surgery that lasted for a whole month was required.
It is a first in the history of medicine for a patient to have a second face transplant. This discovery provides the answer to an essential issue about the viability of a second face transplant. After a certain length of time, the body of the recipient often rejects the organ that was transplanted into it for one reason or another. We now know that even if it occurs with a patient’s face, it is still conceivable for them to get a new one in the future.
In 2005, France was the location of the world’s first face transplant.
Hamon had surgery at the Georges Pompidou hospital in 2010 to have Dr. Laurent Lantieri give him a second face. The procedure took place while Hamon was in his 30s. Hamon suffers from a hereditary disease that has caused tumors to appear on his face. A 63-year-old organ donor provided him with his first transplant when he needed it.
Immunosuppressive medications were able to assist eliminate the possibility of the recipient’s immune system recognizing the donor organ as alien and mounting a hostile response to it. This threat is there whenever a transplant is performed. His physique accommodated itself to the new appearance.
In 2015, however, Hamon came down with a cold. In 2016, it began to show indications of rejection as a result of a medicine that had been provided by a doctor that was incompatible with the anti-rejection meds that he had been taking. By November of 2017, Lantieri saw that tissue on the face had begun to deteriorate, so he excised it.
During the following months, Hamon was in a condition that Lantieri characterized to the Associated Press as being similar to that of “the walking dead.” He was born without ears, eyelids, or skin, had a severely impaired hearing range, and was unable to speak or eat.
“If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri said in an interview with the Associated Press. “The prospect of receiving yet another declination caused us a great deal of anxiety.”
Then, as a result of the discovery of a new suitable organ donor, a fresh face that could be transplanted was made available.
And to everyone’s relief, the new face was a success after many laborious hours of surgery and months of preparation. It will take some time for the face to completely align with the skull, but this will eventually happen.
However, Hamon reports that he is in good shape at the moment. It was claimed that he just spent the weekend in Brittany, which is situated in the northwestern region of France. According to reports from French media, they refer to him as the “man with three faces.”
The Associated Press reported that Hamon stated the following on French television: “I feel like I’ve lost a few decades as well.”
“I’m 43. 22 years old was the donor. “That makes it so that I’ve lost 20 years of my life,” he remarked.