Word: siemionow
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...very proud and very emotional," says microsurgeon Maria Siemionow, who headed the surgical team. "Our patient is someone who had been called names and humiliated, who suffered whenever she appeared in public. Now, she may be able to go comfortably from her home and face the world...
...breakthrough achieved by Siemionow and her team was a longtime goal in facial surgery. Partial face transplants had been successfully performed by teams in France in 2005 and 2007 and in China in 2006, all on patients who had been disfigured either by animal attacks or disease. But no one had ever attempted a procedure on the scale undertaken by the Cleveland team...
...Cleveland Clinic gave Siemionow the green light for the improbable operation, one that involved the transplantation of about 500 sq cm of skin, arteries, veins, nerves, muscles and bony structure, all of which had to be attached with sufficient dexterity to restore the patient's ability to feel, blink, eat, smell, speak and - not incidentally - smile. This was not what doctors call solid-organ transplant; it was a multitissue transplant, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than, say, a heart transplant or a hand graft...
Some day, somewhere, some surgeon is going to perform the first face transplant. It might even be Dr. Maria Siemionow of the Cleveland Clinic. But despite news reports this past weekend that she is interviewing potential candidates for this pioneering operation, don't expect that it will be happening any time soon. It will take months to find the right person with the right combination of physical disfigurement and psychological adaptability to be a recipient. And - if past experience with hand transplants is any guide - possibly more than a year to find a donor for the procedure...