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Face transplant recipient’s donor face now failing
- isatty 7y agoPaywalled.
- arbitrage 7y agoI did not see a paywall.
- arbitrage 7y ago“There are so many unknowns and so many new things we are discovering,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, director of plastic surgery transplantation at Brigham and Women’s and one of Tarleton’s surgeons. Still, he said, “It’s really not realistic to hope faces are going to last (the patient’s) lifetime.”
- hinkley 7y agoWhat's the mortality rate on transplants? If you keep doing the same surgery over and over, won't the patient eventually die on the operating table?
- egypturnash 7y agoI so do not want to click on this link in case there are pictures. I really do not want to see what this looks like. Are there pictures?
- robbyking 7y agoThere's one pre-surgery photo.
- msallin 7y agoI'm with you. These kind of images stay with me forever, particularly at 4 o'clock in the morning.
- tempguy9999 7y agoThere's a pic and it's not so pretty. What's much worse to me is the description of what her husband did to her. Consider skipping this one altogether.
- plutonorm 7y agoI'm a live and let live, everyone has their own pain and their own story, we all are just doing our best sort of guy... But I want to string that guy up.
- newnewpdro 7y agoIt appears he's already dead. https://www.ibtimes.com/who-carmen-tarleton-lye-attack-victims-ex-husband-dies-prison-2630203 https://www.ibtimes.com/who-carmen-tarleton-lye-attack-victi...
- 0x38B 7y agoQuoting the linked article: “I have fully forgiven him and I don’t have the same attitude that a lot of people have with his treatment of me,” Tarleton said. “I have moved on so well and in so many ways. I feel like, for me, it ends a big chapter in my life.” More than what happened to her, what stands out to me is that she's moved on. That's strength. There are things that no one can take away.
- newnewpdro 7y agoI wouldn't be so eager to highlight these statements. Self-blame is very common in victims of domestic abuse, and when one suffers from it they're predisposed towards "forgiveness". It's really a compensation for feeling somehow responsible for their own abuse, which is very unfortunate. I'm glad she seems to have found some closure in his death though.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoYou move on so it doesn't steal anymore of your future. It's the only thing you can do. Stewing about it just lets it take yet more of your life when the cost has already been too high. In most cases, no, the people trying to bleed you emotionally with their pity party for you aren't going to do a damn thing to help improve your quality of life. They will only add to your suffering. Shutting them down as efficiently as possible as just part of protecting yourself from yet more damage in a cold, cruel world full of assholes.
- caspervonb 7y agoThere's one of her from an interview a few years back, scar tissue from chemical burns.
- Medicalidiot 7y agoThis is to be expected. Any time we do any transplant immunosupressants are given to the recipient for the rest of their life, but this only slows the inevitable. Heart transplants recipients all get accelerated atherosclerosis. Lung transplant recipients all get long term fibrosis. We buy time with these procedures and do everything we can to keep them going, but if you have a transplant, you're in a really bad spot to begin with.
- FreeFull 7y agoI wonder how long it will take until growing organs from the recipient's own stem cells is actually viable. There definitely is some interesting research, and it would completely circumvent the problems with the immune system.
- markkat 7y agoThis issue is why I started Forever Labs (YCS17). We bank your stem cells. Immunity presents many difficult problems to be solved. I’d rather worry about the therapeutic developments alone rather than add immunity on top of it.
- puranjay 7y agoI'm a little curious how something like this works within the economic framework of a startup. How do you reconcile the inherently long-term nature of your business (I might need my stem cells in a decade or two) with the inherent instability of a startup (you might go out of business within 3 years)?
- markkat 7y agoThe annual storage fees ($250/yr) cover our banking costs. The banking needs little more than invoicing to remain viable, and with the numbers we have banked, it could survive as a stand-alone entity, or would be an asset that could be acquired by another banking service. My cells are in there, as are those of many of my family members. I want them available 20 years from now. Of course, we aspire to mature beyond a startup, and are getting there. :)
- anon9001 7y ago> “We all know we are in uncharted waters,” Tarleton said. “I would rather not have to go through a catastrophic failure.” If anyone hasn't been through some tragic medical shit in their life, pay attention to that. You'll understand it later.
- rcombine 7y agoThis is what gets me. Take care of yourself, because you don't know what kind of Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head.
- pkaye 7y agoA lot of us think we are invulnerable when we are young. I had a college friend who died of brain cancer a few years after graduating. I myself had a kidney failure a few years ago and now on dialysis. In the snap of a finger your life can change.
- babyslothzoo 7y agoHealth and time are the two biggest things people take for granted, particularly when they're young
- uwuhn 7y agoI'm curious to know how much face transplants cost in the US, and if insurance covers any of it.
- pkaye 7y agoI know some of the face transplants were funded by the department of defense.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoAs potential treatment regime for wounded soldiers who usually are prone to such horrific injuries.
- boyadjian 7y agoWell well, everyone has its own problems. And we are Monday ...
- eecc 7y agoThe f*cking prick needs to be sat in front of a picture of his victim and stare at it 14 hrs a day. Then be given 2 hrs to wash and feel what he has brutally taken away from his victim. Then sleep 8 hrs in order to be fully aware for the next sitting the next day. For about... the rest of his useless life.
- robohoe 7y agoHe’s supposedly dead [0]. https://www.vnews.com/Man-Convicted-of-Maiming-Vermont-Woman-Dies-in-Prison-14411360 https://www.vnews.com/Man-Convicted-of-Maiming-Vermont-Woman...
- paggle 7y agoCases like this are why torture should be a legal sentence for the worst crimes where guilt is not in doubt.
- diag 7y agoThere's no ethical way to condone torture and the US Constitution is supposed to protect us from that.
- paggle 7y agoThere is no “one true ethics.” There are different methods of ethical reasoning, such as Categorical Imperative / Veil of Ignorance etc, and different conclusions that different people can make using these techniques. You can’t just say “there’s no ethical way to condone” torture/executions/meat-eating and make yourself infallible.
- PeterisP 7y agoThing is, there's no such thing as "where guilt is not in doubt". We have a legal standard of "beyond all reasonable doubt", and still we know for certain that this standard, when applied to its full extent as it gets for death row convicts with all the multiple appeals courts, it still manages to convict a nontrivial number of innocent people. So the judgment on whatever should happen in case where guilt is really not in doubt must be reserved for omniscient infallible divine beings, as we the people simply are not capable of implementing a process that's able to determine when guilt is not in doubt, as all practical experience shows that we've tried and failed and failed and failed to do so.
- chrshawkes 7y agoThis is a horrific story I wish I didn't read about. The husband only got a 30 to 70 year sentence for this??? He died in prison but this is a case for the death penalty all the way. This guy ended up dying of natural causes in prison. This woman is living a tortured existence and this guy gets 3 hots and a cot & cable TV until he dies. Disgusting.
- paggle 7y agoThe US “progressives” think much more about the poor murderers and their horrible lives in prison instead of the people they murdered.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y agoThat's a pretty dishonest take on the progressive view of criminal justice. Rehabilitation is just as important, if not more so, than punishment. Simply locking someone in a cage for a few years does nothing to prevent recidivism. It often makes it worse, as once someone comes out of prison, it can be extremely difficult to find work (since employers discriminate against felons), causing them to turn back to a life of crime in order to survive.
- paggle 7y agoYou could never let out anyone who has willfully killed a person, and you wouldn’t have the recidivism problem.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoTarleton, who now lives in Manchester, N.H., told the Boston Globe she has no regrets about the transplant because it dramatically improved her life. She has learned to play the piano and banjo, wrote a memoir and has spoken to many groups about her life. She lost 20 pounds and began walking five miles a week. “I had such a low quality of life prior to my face transplant. Do I wish it had lasted 10 or 20 years? Of course,” she said. I was on an email list and a woman who had two lung transplants described some of what she had been through and also asserted she would do it again and had no regrets. You have to understand these are people who have no other viable options. However bad this is, the alternative is worse. I wrestle with these questions because I wish we were looking for better answers. I am in no way interested in telling people who have had transplants that they were wrong to choose that for themselves. But transplants are dramatic, heroic, headline grabbing procedures. Helping people keep their organs functioning so they don't need a transplant has much less capacity to grab headlines and fascinate the public and so on. We increasingly put our time and effort into really dramatic medical procedures that are very expensive and have a golly, gee whiz factor. I think we are likely largely overlooking better paths that would give a higher quality of life in many cases because they have less razzle dazzle.
- scotty79 7y ago> her estranged husband doused her body with lye after beating her with a baseball bat I'm periodically shocked when I'm reminded of how wide is the spectrum between good and bad.
- PeterisP 7y agoI mean, in medicine most "fixes" for harsh problems are temporary; nothing is permanent as in the end we all are going to die sooner or later. There's a good reason to think not in terms of "people cured" but in metrics like QALY (quality-adjusted life years) gained - even if this transplant fails tomorrow, it has given that poor woman 5 years of significantly improved (according to her own experience) life quality, and that was a good and valuable thing to achieve even if it turns out that it can't last.