Dallas Wiens was 25 years old and working in construction in Fort Worth, Texas, when the aerial lift he was operating brushed against a high-voltage power line. The shock burned his face completely and left him in a coma for three months.
Over the next two and a half years, doctors tried to reconstruct him with 22 different surgeries. None restored what was essential: in the end, Wiens had no lips, eyelids, or defined eye sockets, only skin grafted from other parts of his body and a goatee as the only recognizable trace.
On March 14, 2011, a team of more than 30 surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston worked for more than 15 hours to give him a new face, with skin, muscles, and nerves capable of moving again. Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, who led the operation, preserved certain areas of periorbital skin to support future ocular prostheses. Wiens thus became the second patient to receive a facial transplant at that hospital, after James Maki, who had suffered a similar accident in 2005 when he fell onto the electrified subway tracks.
