Tuesday, April 29, 2014

An About-Face on a Risky Transplant

CHEM-IH                                                                                                   Morgan Frayne
Current Events QTR 4                                                                                      4/29/14

Facial transplants are risky business. The procedure is complicated and so much can go wrong during the surgery. One team removes the face and underlying tissues from a donor, while a second team removes the damaged portions of the recipient’s face. Bone, if needed, is attached first. Then four major arteries and veins, two on each side of the upper neck, are attached as quickly as possible. Once blood flows to nourish the new face, surgeons can take more time to stitch nerves, muscles, other soft tissues and finally the skin. As the graft heals and nerves regenerate, rehabilitation to relearn speaking and other tasks begins; monitoring for rejection lasts a lifetime. The entire procedure and rehabilitation process is tedious and requires a lot of patience and effort with both the patients and the doctors. The surgery has no yet been perfected, and is still relatively new. The first face transplant was performed in France in 2005, and it is said that the surgeons didn’t follow ethical or legal guidelines.
I think that this article informing people on facial transplants is very important to others because anyone can be born with a mutated face, or have a serious trauma that disfigures their face. Either way it’s important to know about things like these because it may affect us and those around us. I think its important to have general knowledge of something like this so that you can have a base to learn off of if it was necessary to know about this for something that’s happened to you or someone you know.
I think that this article was very detailed and certainly gave me an insight into a risky surgery like this. I had no idea that facial transplants were as new as they are, and now that I do I am able to have an opinion on this topic. One thing is that I didn’t really like the way that the author of this article organized his ideas. When it came to the section of the article that informed the reader on the surgeon’s job and the physical procedure, I had to pause because the author made it a little tough to follow the logistics of the surgery.  Regardless I still think this article was splendid and I’m undeniably glad that I read it.


Altman, Lawrence K. "An About-Face on a Risky Transplant." The New York Times. The New York Times, 28 Apr. 2014. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.

4 comments:

  1. sorry about the weird font change in the last paragraph...

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  2. Morgan did a very good job at summarizing the article, An About- Face on a Risky Transplant. I liked how she included a short summery of how the procedure was done. In addition, I also think she did a good job at saying why this article was relevant to society. Finally, I think she did a great job at stating the risks of the surgery and that it was relatively new.
    Even though Morgan did a very good job, there were a few things that could have been done better. She could have included the authors name and the title in her first paragraph. She also could have worded some of her sentences better. Other than that, I think she did a very good job.
    From reading this, I learned that face transplants are relatively new and very risky, which is important to know because many people get face transplants if they were disfigured when they were born, or if they went through a traumatic injury.

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  3. Morgan did a great job of summarizing her article. She gave many examples that were provided in the article, and explained how the procedure worked. She made it easy to understand how risky a transplant surgery is. For example she explained how the new skin was connected to the new face, and how difficult and tedious the procedure is. She was able to take a large amount of information and extract the key points, and explain it thoroughly.
    Although Morgan’s summary was great there were some mistakes. Morgan could have incorporated the author and title in her review. This would have introduced what she was giving a review on, instead of jumping right into the summary. I also think Morgan could have made better transitions between paragraphs and revised her review more carefully. There were many grammatical errors, but overall the review was great.
    This article amazed me, I was not aware of how risky a transplant surgery is. The fact that people have died and that there is no standard procedure astonishes me. Knowing all the technology we have I would have guessed that something as common as birth defects would have a simple cure.

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  4. Morgan did a great job choosing an interesting article to review. She did a great job summarizing it by giving examples from the article. I also enjoyed how she gave a description of how the procedure was done. Lastly, I enjoyed how Morgan gave a really good opinion on the article, explaining what worked and what didnt in the article.

    There were some things that could have been done better to further the review. One of them would be to put the title and author in the review. Another suggestion is maybe using some direct quotes from the article. Other than that I think Morgan did a great job reviewing this article.

    Before reading this I had no idea how risky these face transplants can be, it amazed me. I am also amazed that the surgery has still not been perfected, and it is a relatively new procedure.

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