14 DAY TRIAL // 39-year-old Richard Lee Norris, a photo of who is available next to this article, is set to appear on the cover of coming month's American issue of men's magazine GQ, and this piece of news is now making headlines.
At a first glance, Richard Lee Norris is bound to strike people as your average 30-something man, not breathtakingly good looking, but not downright challenged in the beauty department either. Still, there is more to him than meets the eye.
Thus, it was 17 years ago, when he was just 22, that this man was horrifically disfigured in an accident. In a nutshell, it was in 1997 that Richard Lee Norris accidentally fired a shotgun at his own face and was left without half of it.
According to The Telegraph, the blow caused the man to lose his lower jaw, together with his teeth, his nose, and most of his tongue. Following this incident, Richard Lee Norris spent about 10 years indoors.
Doctors attempted to improve on his quality of life by means of conventional surgery. They only managed to repair part of the damage the man's face sustained when the shotgun went off, and eventually agreed that the best way to go was a full face transplant.
This major intervention took place in 2012 at the University of Maryland Medical Center in the United States, and lasted an impressive 36 hours. About 150 doctors and nurses worked on giving Richard Lee Norris a new face, and, as noticeable, they did a pretty good job.
Information shared with the public says that, during this surgery, the man was given a new lower jaw, new teeth and even a tongue from a donor identified as 21-year-old Joshua Aversano, who passed away after getting hit by a van as he was crossing the road.
Richard Lee Norris now says that, despite the fact that about half of his face is not his own, he very much feels like himself, and is no longer worried about how people might react, should they happen to see him walking down the street.
“When I was disfigured, just walking the sidewalk, I was surprised that more people didn't walk into telephone poles or break their necks to stare at me. Now there's no one paying attention. Unless they know me personally, they don't know I am a face transplant patient,” he says.
The doctors who operated on the 39-year-old man explain that, despite the fact that he appears to be recovering very well, Richard Lee Norris will have to take drugs keeping his body from rejecting the new face for the rest of his life. Still, the man argues that this is a very small price to pay.