One man's lost dream provides new face for another man
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Jim Maki with his donor's widow, Susan Whitman Helfgot, who has written a book about their experiences. -
Joseph Helfgot -
Jim Maki in 2004. Mr. Maki received the nation's second face transplant from Joseph Helfgot in 2009.
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BROOKLINE, Mass. -- When Susan Whitman Helfgot saw Esther Charves jerk back in surprise, she knew something big was about to happen.
It was April 2009, and in the space of two days, Ms. Helfgot had gone from the excitement of learning that her husband Joseph would finally get the heart transplant he had wanted for so long, to the grief of his tragic brain death during the surgery.
Now, she was meeting at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston with Ms. Charves, an organ donation specialist, to talk about how her 60-year-old husband might become an organ donor himself.
"I made this joke [saying], 'Don't tell me you want my husband's Jewish nose?' and I saw her head snap back and I think I knew it right then."
A few seconds later, she was asked to consider donating her husband's face for the nation's second face transplant.
It was a stunning request, "but I didn't flinch when it came to thinking about whether it was the right or wrong thing to do," said Ms. Helfgot, 55, in an interview last month. "When Esther said, 'Imagine a man who can't breathe or swallow or talk or function normally,' I just thought, 'I was raised to believe the body is just the body and the spirit is the spirit, and if you're going to give someone's heart to somebody, why not give them the face?' "
The man waiting for that decision was James Maki, now 61, a Vietnam veteran and former heroin addict who had fallen off a subway platform in Boston in 2005 and landed face-first on an electrified third rail.
The accident obliterated the middle of his face and disabled his right arm and hand. After a series of surgeries, he was left with a gaping hole where his nose had once been and a surgically implanted piece of tissue to separate his nasal passage from what was left of his mouth.
Sitting next to Ms. Helfgot during last month's interview, Mr. Maki remembered when he got the news.
"The day they called me up and told me to come in, [saying] 'We have a donor' -- I had thought I would have to wait a much longer time, so I just said, 'Let's go.' You know, it's what I'd been waiting for, and thanks to Susan and her husband, it happened."
Because face transplants are such natural headline grabbers, it is easy to forget how rare they still are.
Only 13 have been done so far -- eight in France, two in Spain, two in the United States and one in China. Eleven of those patients survive.
The first U.S. face transplant occurred in December 2008 at the Cleveland Clinic. Connie Culp, 47, of Unionport, Ohio, about an hour west of Pittsburgh, had the middle of her face replaced after it had been destroyed by a shotgun blast from her husband.
Mr. Maki's transplant followed four months later, and there have been none done in America since then. Last summer, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center won approval from Pitt's Institutional Review Board to do face transplants, but is still getting organized.
First Published October 24, 2010 12:00 am
