Face Transplants

Ever since they started appearing in the news, several months ago, I have tried to avoid reading all mentions of face transplants.    I still do, because the subject is not good for my stomach.  But, there is this.

What do they do?   Strip off what's left of a person's badly damaged face  and then similarly and very quickly strip off the more presentable visage of someone who has just died. and without a moment's delay they then stitch that onto the patient?  The idea that anyone could get himself together enough to make as little as just the first incision with the intention of cutting a person's whole face or just a part of it off the front of his skull boggles my mind.

The main question I have is, what happens later when the patient wakes up in the mornings, and, while getting  ready to wash his face he looks in the mirror and -- WHOA!

Who is not deeply wedded to the face he was born with, even if it's one that a great many people are glad not to have? The replacement of  an inner organ is one thing, but a face is getting really personal.

But I guess that after the agony of having already had to confront for a while one's original face as badly distorted by some mishap, the dislocation that I would think a person would experience every morning after the operation can be dealt with.

In these very first days face transplants have been  confined strictly to helping people with badly wrecked kissers, and that deserves applause, but how long will that last, vanity and other motives for wanting a different set of features being what they are?   Surely the technology of doing it will be improved by leaps and bounds, so that even having to take anti-rejection meds for the rest of one's life will be eliminated.   I foresee a lot of hairy problems, with crime stepping in to do its bit to stir the boiling broth, as will the film world, and with ethics experts and government officials arriving late and huffing and puffing but loudly asserting that they and only they are in full control of things and all decisions should be placed in their hands, though that won't happen.

So a gang organization gets a commission to find a totally new face for someone with the cash.   They provide one from one of their murder victims, and a shady hospital group performs the operation.  But seeds of discontent have been sown among all concerned.  And meanwhile the patient can't help but imagine feeling himself slipping under the malevolent control of the deceased who once had worn that face.

This is as far as I can go with this hopefully far-fetched scenario, because I just now thought of it, and in its broad outline it has already been done long ago, but new variations are still possible, and they're endless, for the events would be truly Gothic,

This could happen almost anywhere, but it will take place first and most often in Asia.