US firefighter gets world's most extensive face transplant

NEW YORK - A volunteer firefighter from Mississippi whose face was burned off during a home fire rescue received the world's most extensive face transplant, New York University Langone Medical Center said on Monday.

Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez, the Helen L. Kimmel Professor of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center holds a news conference to announce the successful completion of the most extensive face transplant to date in the Manhattan borough of New York City, November 16, 2015.  [Photo/Agencies]

After a 26-hour surgery performed at the New York hospital in August, 41-year-old Patrick Hardison is living with the face of 26-year-old David Rodebaugh, a BMX extreme bicycling enthusiast from Brooklyn who was pronounced brain dead after a cycling accident.

He received a full scalp and face, including ears, nose, lips and upper and lower eyelids.

Now, for the first time since that raging fire in Senatobia, Mississippi in 2001, Hardison can blink and even sleep with his eyes closed - key steps to sparing his blue eyes from blindness that previously seemed all but inevitable, said Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, the plastic surgeon who led the 150-person medical team that performed the procedure.

Simultaneous surgeries took place, Rodriguez said, with Hardison on one operating table while Rodebaugh was on the other. The NYU medical team had practiced for a full year to get it right.

"You only have one chance to land the Rover. The same goes with the face," Rodriguez told Reuters following a news conference in New York earlier on Monday.