A pool spider. That’s how it all started.
Carmen Gil was on vacation in Las Palmas when that tiny creature transmitted a bacterium known as “flesh-eating”. Within days, her body went into septic shock and doctors induced a coma to save her life. While she slept, she lost her nose, lips, palate, and several fingers. But no one said a word about it.
She woke weeks later in Barcelona, unaware of what her own body had been through. One ordinary day, they wheeled her in a wheelchair toward an elevator with a mirror. It was there, without warning, without preparation, without anyone explaining anything to her beforehand, that she saw her reflection for the first time. She had no lips. She had no nose. “I was stunned”, she still recalls, her expression tense.
That moment in front of the mirror ended up becoming the starting point for a medical decision with no precedent anywhere in the world: accepting a face transplant from a donor who had requested euthanasia.