ROCHESTER, Minn.: He’d been waiting for this day, and when his doctor handed him the mirror, Andy Sandness stared at his image and absorbed the enormity of the moment: He had a new face, one that had belonged to another man.
His father and his brother, joined by doctors and nurses at Mayo Clinic, watched him examine his swollen features. He was just starting to heal from one of the rarest surgeries in the world — a face transplant, the first at the medical center. He had the nose, cheeks, mouth, lips, jaw, chin, even the teeth of his donor. Resting in his hospital bed, he still couldn’t speak clearly, but he had something to say.
“Far exceeded my expectations,” he scrawled in a notebook.
“You don’t know how happy that makes us feel,” Dr. Samir Mardin replied as he read the message aloud.
The exchange came near the end of a medical journey that revolved around two outdoorsmen, both just 21 when they decided to kill themselves: Sandness survived but with a face almost destroyed by a gunshot; the other man died.
Their paths wouldn’t converge for years, but when they did — in side-by-side operating rooms — one man’s tragedy offered hope the other would have a second chance at a normal life.
Two days before Christmas in 2006, a deeply depressed Andy Sandness put a rifle beneath his chin and pulled the trigger.
Instantly, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. When police arrived, he begged: “Please, please don’t let me die!!”
He was rushed from his home in eastern Wyoming, treated at two hospitals, then transferred to Mayo Clinic, where he met Mardini, a plastic surgeon whose specialty is facial reconstruction.
Sandness had no nose or jaw. His mouth was shattered; just two teeth remained. He’d lost some vision in his left eye.
Mardini and his team reconstructed his jaw with bone, muscle and skin from the hip and a leg. They reconnected facial bones with titanium plates and screws.
After about eight surgeries over 4½ months, Sandness returned to tiny Newcastle, Wyo., where friends and family embraced him.
But his world had shrunk. When he went grocery shopping, he avoided eye contact with children so he wouldn’t scare them. He had almost no social life.
His mouth was too small for a spoon so he tore up food. He wore a prosthetic nose, but it often fell off outdoors.
The prospect of 15 more surgeries Mardini had mapped out scared him. For several years, Sandness made annual visits to Mayo.
Then in 2012, Mardini called. It looked like Mayo was going to launch a face transplant program; Sandness might be an ideal patient.
Mardini urged him to “think very hard” about the transplant. Only about two dozen had been done worldwide. He wanted Sandness to understand the risks and lifelong regimen of anti-rejection drugs. Sandness has some concern about side effects but was undeterred.
Last June, five months after his name was added to the waiting list of the United Network for Organ Sharing, he got word: A donor was available.
Calen “Rudy” Ross had fatally shot himself. His devastated widow, Lilly, 19, was eight months pregnant. She carried out her husband’s wishes to be an organ donor.
Mayo’s medical team, which had rehearsed the surgery for 3½ years with cadaver heads, gathered one June night to start a 56-hour marathon.
Having a nose and mouth are blessings, he says. “The looks are a bonus.”
Sandness, now 31, is thrilled to eat steak and pizza again.