Patrick Hardison entered a burning house looking for a trapped woman.
It was September 2001, and he was working as a volunteer firefighter in Senatobia, Mississippi. The roof collapsed on him before he could get out. He survived, but the fire took his eyelids, ears, lips, and almost all of his nose. For 14 years, he endured 71 reconstructive surgeries, and still he couldn’t close his eyes to sleep, laugh without pain, or walk down the street without feeling the stares of strangers.
In August 2015, at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, more than 100 doctors led by surgeon Eduardo Rodríguez gave him an opportunity that seemed impossible: a 26-hour face transplant, the most complex ever performed up to that point. He received a new face, scalp, ears, and the muscles he needed to blink again. That face had belonged to David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old cyclist who died in an accident in Brooklyn and who, as a registered donor, gave a stranger back what the fire had taken from him 14 years earlier.
