Remember that movie Face Off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage that was made in 1997? Well, that’s actually a thing. Modern science allows one person’s face to be transplanted onto another person’s face.
And the circumstances in which Andy Sandness received the face of Calen “Rudy” Ross was quite coincidental.
Both Sandness and Ross were outdoorsmen and they were both 21-years-old when they decided to commit suicide by shooting themselves. Though Sandness, of Wyoming, survived his self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chin in 2006, it shattered his entire face and left him disfigured.
Ross, who lived in Minnesota, did not survive and left behind his 19-year-old wife Lilly who was 8-months-pregnant when he also shot himself in the face in 2016.
Ross’ heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys were donated along with his face. That wasn’t the easiest decision for Lilly to make.
“I was skeptical at first,” Lilly told ABC13. “I didn’t want to walk around and all of a sudden see Calen.”
She was told that because the donor had his own eyes and forehead he wouldn’t look exactly like Ross. Sandness underwent a 60-hour surgery and was the first face-t0-face transplant ever conducted by Mayo Clinic.
Sandness was only left with a mouth that was about the size of a quarter and a prosthetic nose.
“I wouldn’t go out in public; I hated going into bigger cities,” he told Washington Post.
When he woke up he had an entire face. His “nose, upper and lower jaw, palate, teeth, cheeks, facial muscles, oral mucosa, some of the salivary glands and the skin of the face (from below the eyelids to the neck and from ear to ear),” the Mayo Clinics said in a press release.. “The surgical team used virtual surgical planning technology and 3-D printing to optimize the aesthetic and functional outcomes of the surgery.”
“Far exceeded my expectations,” Sandness wrote on paper from his hospital bed before he was able to speak after his surgery.
About 16-months after that, Sandness got to meet Lilly to say thank you.
“I don’t know that you can ever say enough thanks for what they’ve given me,” he said. “I mean, Lilly, it’s an unbelievable … it’s an unbelievable gift. There just, I mean, you can’t … you can’t give enough thanks. You can’t give enough money. There’s nothing you can do. Except now I can just show them.”
Lilly saw the resemblance and her husband but said Sandness looked like a different person.
“It looks amazing,” Lilly told ABC13 said. “You can see Rudy with the chin because you can’t grow hair in the middle, too. And he’s got the flushed cheeks, and he’s got a little mole on his nose. Otherwise, I see Andy. I don’t see much of Rudy in him.”
She said she was proud of her husband and glad to see how his donations are saving other people’s lives.
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