The Cellar - August 17th, 2018 : Transplant

At 18, Katie Stubblefield blew her face off in a suicide attempt with a .308 rifle.
She blew off her nose and sinuses, her mouth except for the corners of her lips, and much of her mandible and maxilla, bones that
make up the jaws and front of the face, plus brain damage from concussion.
At 31 Adrea Schneider died of an overdose. Her mother was an addict and Adrea was born addicted.
Her Grandmother donated Adrea’s face.
I'm surprise it took 16 hours to remove the face and 15 hours to install.

http://cellar.org/2017/face1.jpg

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Katie was an irrepressible little girl, her older sister, Olivia McCay, told me. “She was fearless, very fearless, and a lot of fun.” She developed a quick, sarcastic sense of humor, a trait she shared with her brother, Robert. But as she grew older, Olivia noticed, Katie put enormous pressure on herself to achieve. “She wanted to be the best in all of these sports that she’d never even tried before,” Olivia said. “She wanted to be the best academically. She studied for hours, all the time.”

http://cellar.org/2017/face2.jpg

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Then, on March 25, 2014, Katie picked up her boyfriend’s phone and found texts to another girl. When she confronted him, her family told me, he broke up with her.
Hurt and angry, Katie went to Robert’s place in Oxford, where she furiously texted and paced, back and forth. Robert called their mother. While the two were outside talking about how upset Katie was, she went into the bathroom, put the barrel of Robert’s .308-caliber hunting rifle below her chin, and pulled the trigger. When Robert kicked in the locked door, he found his little sister covered in blood. “And her face is gone,” he recalled, still shaken by the memory.

http://cellar.org/2017/face3.jpg

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Papay studied biomedical engineering before going to medical school; his training taught him to “work from failure,” anticipating potential problems and devising solutions. Papay told me he gravitated to plastic surgery because it’s about function as much as form. “Everyone thinks that we’re the cosmetic guys, the hairdressers of surgery, and we do face-lifts and breast augmentations,” he said. “But in plastic surgery and now face transplants we’re innovators—we’re fix-it guys.”

http://cellar.org/2017/face4.jpg

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Insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid don’t pay for face transplants because they’re still considered experimental. But the American Society for Reconstructive Transplantation has paved the way for insurance payments by proposing guidelines for determining medical necessity. The Department of Defense made Katie’s transplant possible through the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM), which has also supported hand transplants.
The consortium of military and private institutions, established in 2008, had a $300 million budget, with $125 million from the military and the rest from other sources. It put transplants and other innovative research into regenerating tissue and bone, as well as new immunosuppressive therapies, on a fast track. Joachim Kohn, one of the first directors of AFIRM’s research projects, told me that the initiative was launched after the Second Battle of Fallujah, the bloodiest conflict of the Iraq War. “Hundreds of severely burned and crippled service members came back to America,” he said. A paper published in 2015 reported that 4,000 service members in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sustained injuries to their faces, about 50 considered catastrophic.

That's it folks, you paid for it.

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