It made for an emotional meeting. More than a year after Andy Sandness had a groundbreaking face transplant at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he met the widow of the dead man whose face it used to be.

Andy Sandness, 32, from Wyoming, had 56 hours of surgery last summer to have the face of Calen “Rudy” Ross transplanted, in the first such operation the clinic had performed. The recent meeting, arranged by the clinic, brought Sandness and the donor’s widow, Lucy Ross, together for the first time.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Ross said she had been fretful beforehand, afraid that seeing Sandness would bring back painful memories of her husband, and childhood sweetheart, who had taken his own life. In the event, there was little likeness: the two men had such different bone structure, the face did not look the same.

In the tearful meeting in the clinic’s library, the two hugged each other on sight. Ross said that instead of her former husband, she saw a man whose life had been transformed by the transplant. “It made me proud,” she said. “The way Rudy saw himself, he didn’t see himself like that.”

Sandness said: “I wanted to show you that your gift will not be wasted.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lilly Ross, left, shows family photos to face transplant recipient Andy Sandness after meeting at a library at the Mayo Clinic. Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

In the marathon operation led by plastic surgeon Samir Mardini, Mayo Clinic surgeons overlaid the donor’s skin onto Sandness’s raw facial tissue. Over more than two days they restored his nose, upper and lower jaws, teeth, salivary glands and facial muscles. The operation was planned out using virtual surgical technology and 3D printing to maximise the aesthetic outcome.

Sandness must now take drugs every day to prevent his body from rejecting the face, and constantly works to retrain his nerves, giving himself facial massages and striving to improve his speech by running through the alphabet while in the car or the shower.

Sandness lost most of his face in 2006 when he put a rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger. A decade later, Calen Ross shot himself and died in southwestern Minnesota. Horrifically scarred, Sandness had become almost a recluse by then.

Lucy Ross had already agreed to donate her husband’s lungs, kidneys and other organs when LifeSource, a US non-profit that facilitates organ and tissue transplants broached the idea of face donation. It turned out that the men’s ages, blood type and skin colour were such good matches that Mardini said they could have been cousins.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lilly Ross shows her family photos to Andy Sandness during their meeting at the Mayo Clinic Photograph: Charlie Neibergall/AP

Ross, who was eight months’ pregnant at the time, consented, knowing that her son might one day see their father’s face on a stranger. One reason she went ahead, she told AP, was that she wanted her son to understand what his father did to help others.

The surgery has given Sandness a new lease of life. Before the operation, he kept out of sight. “I wouldn’t go out in public. I hated going into bigger cities,” he said. “And now I’m just really spreading my wings and doing the things I missed out on, going out to restaurants and eating, going dancing.”

Mardini and the medical team have delighted in Sandness’s progress. “It turns out Andy is not as much of an introvert as we thought,” Mardini said. “He’s enjoying these times, where he’s missed out on 10 years of his life.”

Ross and Sandness told AP that they now feel like family and plan to stay in touch. The meeting, Ross said, helped her get over a year filled with grieving, funeral arrangements, childbirth and difficult decisions about organ donations. “Meeting Andy, it has finally given me closure,” she said. “Everything happened so fast.”