The face is a vital organ in terms of social interaction and personal relationships, but you have hardly felt to hide your face for years and years all together. However, there are people who are doing the same, the reason, they have either burnt faces or they are deformed due to some disease. But, what makes it worse is that we as a society don’t exactly treat them kind.
A year after a Frenchwoman received the world’s first partial face transplant, doctors say the operation was a success and she is gaining more and more sensitivity and facial mobility. Dinoire’s immune system nearly rejected the transplant twice, the doctors’ statement said, but she was given immuno-depressants that helped overcome the threat.
The risks are huge surely. If the body rejects the face - and the body attacks transplanted skin more viciously than an internal organ such as a kidney - the surgeons might have to take it off, leaving nerves and blood vessels exposed. The outcome is so uncertain, they say, that the recipient has to be willing to risk death. Would they trade their life or part of their life if worst comes to worst?
The other concept which should be emphasized again and again is that this is not for vanity. This is for people who are otherwise suffering. This is for people who want to look normal. They want to walk on the street without people staring at them.
The public’s biggest misunderstanding about face transplants - that it’s a form of identity swapping - can be blamed on Hollywood. The best-known face transplants on the big screen may be those seen in 1997’s Face/Off, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, in which a government agent swaps faces with a terrorist.
Doctors expect a different reality. There is lots going on in research that may have benefits for transplant patients. However, it won’t happen tomorrow.
While nobody knows for sure, computer models, cadaver experiments and past experience with facial reconstruction surgeries lead doctors to believe that because the bones beneath will be different, the donated face will look different.
Team members say that by viewing often gruesome pictures and dissecting extensive medical records, they are narrowing the field to determine who should be the first to get a new face. But, in the here and now, the obvious way to help these people is by more people adding their names to the organ donor register and to make their wishes known to their family.
Via: USAToday
