Face transplant gives second chance to Jim Maki
Jim Maki has been born again four years after falling off a Boston subway platform and destroying his face.
He got a second chance and received another man’s features through a face transplant surgery. Maki became the second person in the United States to receive a face transplant and is very risky. Dr. Bohdan “Bo” Pomahac, the director of the burn center was on call on the 30th of June 2005 when he was admitted to the intensive care unit of Brigham and Woman’s Hospital after accidentally falling with his face on an electrified subway rail. He said that the patient arriving in the emergency room was completely disfigured and the tissue on his face practically vanished. Maki suffered third degree burns and had lost his nose, cheeks, teeth, part of his mouth, muscle, bone and nerves and damaged one of his eyes and one arm. Pomahac had never seen such severe facial injuries in his entire career and he realized that the damaged tissue will never be replaced by a new one. Maki also had difficulties when speaking, eating or drinking and he was often mocked and sometimes physically assaulted by other people, so he preferred to spend much of his time inside his home, outside Boston.
Pomahac performed multiple surgeries on Maki’s face over the years but he was not able to improve his looks a lot so he listed him for a face transplant in February 2009. The donor of the face that Maki was going to receive was Joseph Helfgot, the child of two Holocaust survivors, who grew up in a very poor family and became a university professor and in the end a life saver. Helfgot suffered with heart problems his whole life and his condition got worse as he was ageing. After being listed as a candidate for a heart transplant, the hospital found a donor in April 2009, but unfortunately suffered a stroke on the operating table and was declared brain dead.
Before the surgery, Helfgot instructed Susan Whitman, his wife, to donate his organs if anything bad happens to him in the surgery room. So after his death his family offered to donate his liver, kidneys and his transplanted heart and they also suggested that will be willing to donate his face and skin. So Maki was rushed into the operating room four days later and Pomahac was helped during the surgery by many surgeons, anesthesiologists, immunotherapists, nurses, residents, physical therapists and technicians. A face transplant is a very risky procedure because of the dangers of the surgery itself and because of the possibility that the donor blood vessels would not be compatible and would not connect with Maki’s tissue and his body might reject the new face. Even if the surgery goes well Maki might be forced to take medications to fight off rejection and infection for the rest of his life.Pomahac and his team exercised on dead bodies before doing the surgery, because there was little information related to this kind of intervention since only one face transplant has ever been performed in the United States. There were two teams of doctors working at the same time, one for the donor and one for the recipient, and after seven hours of hark work the facial parts of the donor were taken to Maki’s operating room, where Pomahac started linking the tissues and vessels using a microscope. Jessica Maki, his daughter, and Cynthia Maki, his wife, say that it the new face surprisingly looks like his old face. Maki was very happy with the results of the surgery. There were about a dozen face surgeries performed in the whole world, in France, Spain, the U.S. and China.
