Patrick Hardison – face donor David Rodebaugh

The second candidate looked very promising. However, the man’s family withdrew him from consideration.

Hardison was preparing to accept that he might never get a face transplant. Then, out of the blue, another potential donor came to light. LiveOnNY, a nonprofit that coordinates organ donations in the New York area, had found a match. The face belonged to David Rodebaugh a 26-year-old who had sustained a massive head injury in a bike accident and had been declared brain dead.

After David passed away, his mother, Nancy Millar, decided to donate her son’s organs, including liver, heart, and kidneys. More important, she decided to also donate his face.

“I said, ‘You better save his face. He has the face of a porcelain doll.’ And he’s a donor — we had talked about it,” Millar told People.

She didn’t hesitate for a second when she heard about Patrick and the possibility of him getting a face transplant. For her, it was a chance for David to live on.

“When I met Patrick, I saw this strength, this strong, manly, burly kind of energy in him — that David had,” she recalled.

“David wanted to be a firefighter, an I knew if this guy was a firefighter — he was willing to walk into a fire to save people and risk his own life — then he had the strength that David had.”

Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez assembled his team of 100 doctors, nurses, and other medical aides, and together they prepared for Hardison’s surgery. It was the most extensive soft tissue face transplant ever performed – the surgery took a whopping 26 hours.