When Andy Sandness woke up after his face transplant, what stunned him wasn’t the new hairline or the feel of skin that had once belonged to another man. It was the duration: the surgery had taken 56 hours — far longer than he’d expected.
“We talked about 36 hours,” he recalls, “so I was shocked.” He couldn’t imagine the drama that had played out in the operating room while surgeons worked against the clock to remove his existing deformities and then transfer another man’s face onto his own.
