A New Hampshire woman who received a face transplant after her estranged husband beat her and doused her with a toxic chemical is in need of a new donor for a second face due to tissue damage.

Carmen Blandin Tarleton, 51, was burned over 80 percent of her body when she was beaten with a baseball bat and doused with industrial strength lye in 2007 when she lived in Vermont.

She underwent 38 surgeries in three months before receiving a face transplant six years ago at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she’s being evaluated for a possible second transplant.

Tarleton, of Manchester, New Hampshire, told the Boston Globe that her transplant in February 2013 dramatically improved her life.

“I had such a low quality of life prior to my face transplant. Do I wish it had lasted 10 or 20 years? Of course,” she said.

She has learned to play the piano and banjo, wrote a memoir, has spoken to several groups about her life and began walking five miles a week.

But Tarleton also has had repeated rejection episodes when her new face became swollen and red.

She was successfully treated, but last month, doctors discovered that some blood vessels to her face had narrowed and closed, causing facial tissue to die.

If the damage progresses slowly, she could be put on the wait list for a new donor face — but under the worst-case scenario, the tissue would die quickly, and surgeons would have to remove it and reconstruct her original face.

“We all know we are in unchartered waters,” she said. “I would rather not have to go through a catastrophic failure.”

Tarleton’s doctors said most transplanted organs have limited lifespans. Despite successes in the field, face transplantation is still experimental — with many unanswered questions about benefits versus long-term risks.

“There are so many unknowns and so many new things we are discovering,” said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, director of plastic surgery transplantation at Brigham and one of Tarleton’s surgeons.

Still, he said, “it’s really not realistic to hope faces are going to last (the patient’s) lifetime.”

More than 40 patients worldwide have received face transplants, including 15 in the US, where none have lost their donor faces.

But last year, a French man whose immune system rejected his donor face eight years after his first transplant underwent a second.

Dr. Brian Gastman, a transplant surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, which did the first US face transplant 11 years ago, said more patients are starting to experience chronic rejection.

“We all believe every patient will likely need a retransplant” at some point, he said.

It will take at least a month to evaluate Tarleton and reach a decision about a second transplant, her doctors said.

Aside from the setback with her face, she was left almost blind after a synthetic cornea transplanted into her left eye failed recently.

“These are not common things to go wrong, but when things go wrong, you have to deal with it,” she said. “l will get back to where I was. How, I don’t know. I will get through this.”

With Post wires