Face Off I

In 1997, there was a movie called Face Off which featured a face transplant. I recently provided anesthesia for a case that reminded me very much of the movie (it was not a real face transplant, though such surgeries have been performed). A gentleman who unfortunately had widespread invasive cancer of the jaw and throat needed a wide excision, lymph node dissection, tracheostomy, and reconstruction. For such a large surgery, the ear-nose-throat surgeons took off much of the skin of the face, a procedure that, for most, is as awful as it sounds. But for those few of us who chose to do medicine, who studied human anatomy, who dissected cadavers in the first month of medical school, this was an amazing experience. Watching the surgeons work, identify vessels, nerves, bones, and the cancer was quite remarkable. There is a certain beauty and art in the human body, and under the veneer of skin there is an intricacy and mechanic that I will not ever fully understand, at which I will continue to marvel. At the end of the eleven hour surgery, the patient's face was reconstructed and the only evidence of this intrusion was a thin necklace-ringed scar at the base of his neck.