Face Off, About This Man Who Received Face Transplant Surgery

Back in 1997 John Travolta and Nicholas Cage showed us what taking one man's face and putting it on another man's body could look like. It was the coolest thing my childhood eyes saw that year, but at the same time I knew it was completely fiction. I knew the skin on a man's face could not successfully come off and be place on another person and both would manage to survive. However, I was wrong. Apparently it is possibly and there is a name for it. Face Transplant Surgery. 

This year, 2015, the very first successful face transplant surgery was done on a 41 year old man named Patrick Hardison. Hardison was a firefighter whose face was severely burned in 2001. According to Huffington Post, Hardison underwent a 26 hour procedure as doctors put a brand new face on him. 

This sounds like a good fiction movie, but it is not. This is also not your typical cosmetic surgery. They did not need to reshape his ears or his nose. They were not making his mouth bigger or smaller. He was getting new cheeks or laser eye surgery. For the procedure the face of a man who was pronounced brain dead after a terrible bike accident was used to give Hardison a brand new physical appearance.  

Technology never ceases to amaze us and confuse us at the very same time.