Transplant recipient learns to accept his fate, and his new face

From the start, Dallas Wiens has believed that the face he woke up with after surgery was his own.

Not a mask — not the nose, eyelids, lips, hair, skin or gray-tinged beard of another man — but his own face.

“To me, it is who I am,” said Wiens, 26. “It’s me.”

As the country’s first full-face transplant recipient during groundbreaking surgery in Boston, Wiens has not only accepted, but embraced his face and his fate.

“Every day when I wake, I look forward to getting up,” he said. “I thank God and the donor’s family that I wake up to a miracle every day.”

For the first time since the 2008 accident that cost him his sight and erased his facial features, he can feel his daughter’s kiss brush his cheek, smell lasagna cooking and recognize the scent of a friend’s perfume. He is especially pleased with his nose and can breathe deeply, and even sneeze.

Since the transplant in March there have been no episodes of rejection. Despite a few rough spots after the surgery when the medications made him feel awful and the ordeal zapped his energy, Wiens has gained 12 pounds and is bouncing back.

As the swelling has gone down, Wiens has gotten to know this new face with no forehead wrinkles, some graying whiskers and a barely visible scar where old and new connect.

So convinced is Wiens that his body has totally accepted the transplant — from an anonymous older donor whom he knows little about — that when he runs his fingers through his new dark brown hair, he says it feels just like it did before the accident.

“My body is changing the hair color,” said Wiens, who attributes the texture and color change to hormones. “I have gray hair now exactly where I had gray hair before.”

It is an observation made by a man who cannot see the changes himself, but who is so highly attuned to his body that he can tell when he is getting sick days before symptoms appear.

He knows, too, how important it is to his recovery that he accepts the face, not just physically, but mentally.

This resiliency and ironclad commitment to life is typical of Wiens, who is living with his grandparents in Fort Worth.

“You won’t meet too many people in life like Dallas,” said Dr. Jeffrey Janis, chief of plastic surgery at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas and an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “He has amazing strength, mental fortitude and deep faith.”

As remarkable as the groundbreaking face transplant is, the real story lies with Wiens himself.

“For me, he’s been an inspiration,” Janis said. “He is a true testament to the human spirit.”

Wiens’ family knew from the start how bleak the outlook was. It was Nov. 13, 2008. Wiens had been painting a Fort Worth church when the cherry picker he was riding in brushed against a high-voltage electrical wire.

He was rushed by helicopter to Parkland, where doctors told the family that if he survived he would be paralyzed. This was in addition to the burns that had left him without any facial features.

Wiens spent three months in a therapeutic coma while his family took turns sitting by his bed. Then one day, while clasping his hand, Sue Peterson unconsciously pushed her grandson’s thumb down. He pushed back.

“We had a little thumb war,” she said. “I knew from that moment on he was in there.”

Always headstrong and stubborn, Wiens drew on those qualities to get him through 22 surgeries, including a 32-hour operation that used tissue from his back to create a featureless “melon” face. Along the way, his daughter, Scarlette, 18 months old at the time of the accident, was his greatest motivation.

“The whole journey was made easier by Dallas’ tenacity and will to live,” Peterson said.

Seeing him the first time did take his brother David back, but only briefly.

“The same mannerisms and mind-set were there,” he said. “I knew it was still Dallas.”

Wiens’ recovery gave him lots of time with Scarlette, who is now 4.

“To her, I was always Daddy who just had a boo-boo,” said Wiens, who is divorced from Scarlette’s mother. “She knew I couldn’t see with my eyes, but I could see with my hands and heart.”

More than two years had passed since that awful day in 2008 when Peterson walked into Parkland’s emergency room to find her grandson on a gurney, his skin blackened, his hair melded to his scalp and his lips turned inside out.

The transplant was paid for by the U.S. Department of Defense, which gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston a grant for research that could benefit disfigured soldiers. Wiens did not have medical insurance when he was injured.

The surgery, led by Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, not only gave Dallas what looked like a face, but also what acted like a face, with movement and sensation, Janis said.

When Scarlette saw that new face for the first time, she immediately called her prince handsome.

This month, Wiens will return to Boston for surgery to remove excess skin and revise scar tissue. Later, Wiens hopes to get teeth implants. He learned to speak well with his melon face, but he is not quite used to talking with his new mouth, Peterson said.

Wiens, who said he would like to go to college, plans to write two books and maybe make a documentary.

One of his biggest goals is to encourage others, especially those who have been disfigured.

Jarvis writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.