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At 22, Joe DiMeo is rediscovering a series of sensations in his hands and face: he can already feel hot, cold or someone else’s touch. But the young man is still getting used to all this. Both the face and the hands are “new”, they have had them for less than six months. They are the product of a revolutionary surgery performed after an accident that left Joe with almost no fingers and a severely disfigured face.
“It is really surprising when something new touches me or I touch something new and I can feel it for the first time,” the young man said in an interview.
The desire to return to his parents’ home in New Jersey, in the United States, gives him motivation to face the long hours of daily rehabilitation, but the ultimate goal is another. “Driving is what I love the most right now,” he said.
It was driving where the nightmare began. He was coming home from a night shift at a pharmaceutical company when he fell asleep at the wheel. He lost control of the car, which flipped and exploded, leaving Joe with third degree burns to 80% of his body.
Four months followed, some of them in an induced coma, in the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey. He had to undergo more than 20 reconstructive surgeries that left him with limited use of his hands and face.
He arrived at the plastic surgery department at NYU Langone Medical Center, where three successful face transplants had already been performed, months after the accident. In August 2020, he was finally operated on by a team of more than 140 surgeons, nurses and assistants in a 23-hour procedure that gave him a new face and a new pair of hands.
“We wanted to do not only an operation that would make him look better, but it would also work properly, especially his hands,” said Eduardo Rodríguez, the surgeon who coordinated the operation.
Joe’s recovery will still take many months: he will have to continue doing up to five hours of rehab a day and will need medication throughout his life to prevent his body from rejecting transplants. But Rodríguez says the patient is doing very well and is one of the “most motivated” people he has ever met.
Joe says that now he can do mundane things, like make breakfast or work out alone. “I can already see myself. This is me, ”he said.
According to the United Organ Sharing Network, which oversees the US transplant system, there have been 18 facial transplants in the United States and 35 hand transplants. However, simultaneous face and hand transplants are extremely rare and only occurred twice in the world before Joe DiMeo.
The first attempt at this operation took place in 2009, in Paris (France), but the patient ended up dying just over a month later due to complications related to the operation. Two years later, a Boston medical team tried to repeat the procedure on a woman who had been attacked by a chimpanzee, but the hand transplant was finally withdrawn a few days later.
