Dubai: Hope is back in his life. She had gone missing for the past 15 years.
Twelve days ago Richard Lee Norris, 37, was a man without a face. Three days after his ground-breaking surgery Norris would be remembered as the first man to undergo the most extensive full face transplant in history.
As the bandages came off, peeled with delicate intricacy — after a marathon operation that lasted 36 hours — Norris exhaled a sigh of relief. He knew that among other things he would finally be able to smell the roses that had often graced the whitewashed corners of his hospital room. A sense he had been deprived of for nearly two decades.
"Having Norris look at himself through a mirror and touch his face, touch his lips, touch his nose is the most amazing moment ever. And for him to hug me and thank me was wonderful. We did our part, but it was a very emotional moment for me. It was just great to give him this gift," Dr Eduardo D. Rodriguez, MD, DDS, associate professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine told Gulf News during a phone interview.
Dr Rodriguez understands the implications of his ‘gift'. He was, after all, the chief surgeon who led the operative team responsible for Norris' new face. And the only person Norris first turned to when he decided to get his face back after losing it in a gruesome gun accident in 1997. He was 22 at that time.
That was in 2005 when Dr Rodriguez who is also the chief of plastic, reconstructive and maxillofacial surgery at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Centre at the University of Maryland Medical Centre, decided to take up Norris' case.
When the accident took his lips, his nose and a major part of his face, the damage was more than skin deep. Norris lived as a recluse and according to Dr Rodriguez not a functioning member of society.
All that changed during the miracle surgery between March 19 and March 20. Ten years of research later, Dr Rodriguez and his team were finally ready to give Norris his life back. He would no longer need to shop for groceries at night. He could eat and step out in public without wearing a surgical mask. He had finally stepped out of his shadows. Norris was finally free.
"During the reconstructive surgery, what was taken out was essentially the forehead, the soft tissue skin, portions around the upper and lower eye lid, all of the soft tissue over the cheeks, over the nose ... all the way down to the neck. What was also removed were portions of the skeleton which we had reconstructed from tissues from his body ... all of that was replaced in addition to the tongue," Dr Rodriguez said. That was essentially the final stage. What went into the process spanned a period of a few months and multiple rehearsals with cadaver dissections.
"We did a total of 10 to 15 constant dissections to be ready. We knew exactly what equipment we needed. We were prepared for times which would be critical or essentially irreversible moments. So we rehearsed and edited as if it were real time."
Prior to the final operation, Norris had 12 more surgeries to regain additional mobility in his face and mouth and to reconstruct some of his features. This was before Dr Rodriguez and his team reached a dead end.
While Norris had consented to a clinical trial for a facial transplantation, he needed a donor to ‘borrow' his face from. The date that would change his life forever was March 17, when Dr Rodriguez got news of a ‘perfect match' for Norris.
That was then. Summing up his entire experience as ‘remarkable' and eight days into his post-operative surgery, Dr Rodriguez says Norris is "actually doing quite well".
"He still has the sutures and stitches in place. The swelling is still subsiding, so he is really recuperating quite well, much faster than I would have ever thought," he said.
