Read This, Not That

A Man Without A Face

For the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian follows the story of Dallas Wiens, who underwent one of the first full face transplants last year after suffering an electrical accident that left him featureless. 

“Electrical burns can have an oddly mercurial impact on the human body. They can devastate tissue immediately, or they can have no effect at all, or they can have a delayed effect. The period of limbo can last days, and during that time doctors must wait for each cell in the affected area to “declare itself” living or dead. 

…

Soon enough, the cells throughout Wiens’s face began declaring themselves dead in a steady cascade, laying waste to skin, muscle, and bone. By late afternoon, half his face was showing signs of injury. After about a day, every feature was subsumed by swelling. Wiens’s lips were “black as a piece of charcoal,” his grandmother, Sue Peterson, recalled. His skin turned resinous, joining with muscle, fat, and even hair, in a semi translucent shell.”

Read the full article here.