A US first, New Hampshire woman gets second face transplant

BOSTON (AP) — For the second time in a decade, a New Hampshire woman has a new face.

Carmen Blandin Tarleton, whose face was disfigured in an attack by her ex-husband, became the first American and only the second person globally to undergo the procedure after her first transplant began to fail six years after the operation. The transplant from an anonymous donor took place at Boston's Brigham and Women’s Hospital in July.

The 52-year-old former nurse is expected to resume her normal routine, which all but ended when the first transplant failed a year ago.

“I'm elated,” Tarleton told The Associated Press, in an exclusive telephone interview from her home in Manchester. She is still healing from the operation so photos are not being made available of her new face.

“The pain I had is gone,” she said. “It's a new chapter in my life. I've been waiting for almost a year. I'm really happy. It's what I needed. I got a great match.”

More than 40 patients worldwide have received face transplants, including 16 in the United States. None of the American patients had lost their donor faces until Tarleton.

But in 2018, a French man whose immune system rejected his donor face eight years after his first transplant underwent a second. The doctor who did the transplant, Dr. Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris, said that patient is “doing very well.”

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, who did Tarleton's first face transplant, was hesitant to do another and favored doing reconstruction surgery instead. But his team became convinced of the merits of a second transplant after Tarleton described how much the first one improved her life.

“She really wanted to try one more time,” said Pomahac, who led the 20-hour, second surgery. A team of around 45...