22-year-old relearns how to smile after rare transplant

But simultaneous face and double hand transplants are extremely rare and have only been tried twice before. The first attempt was in 2009 on a patient in Paris who died about a month later from complications. Two years later, Boston doctors tried it again on a woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee but ultimately had to remove the transplanted hands days later.

In pic - Joe DiMeo uses his new hands to grasp a knife and fork to cut some modeling plastic during an occupational therapy session.

"The fact they could pull it off is phenomenal," said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital who led the second such attempt. "I know first hand it's incredibly complicated. It's a tremendous success." DiMeo will be on lifelong medications to avoid rejecting the transplants, as well as continued rehabilitation to gain sensation and function in his new face and hands.

In 2018, DiMeo fell asleep at the wheel, he said, after working a night shift as a product tester for a drug company. The car hit a curb and utility pole, flipped over, and burst into flames. Another driver who saw the accident pulled over to rescue DiMeo. Afterward, he spent months in a medically induced coma and underwent 20 reconstructive surgeries and multiple skin grafts to treat his extensive third-degree burns.

In pic - DiMeo has been in intensive rehabilitation, devoting hours daily to physical, occupational and speech therapy.

Once it became clear conventional surgeries could not help him regain full vision or use of his hands, DiMeo's medical team began preparing for the risky transplant in early 2019. In early August, the team finally identified a donor in Delaware and completed the 23-hour procedure a few days later. They amputated both of DiMeo's hands, replacing them mid-forearm and connecting nerves, blood vessels and 21 tendons with hair-thin sutures. They also transplanted a full face, including the forehead, eyebrows, nose, eyelids, lips, both ears and underlying facial bones.