Like the patients who came before her, Tarleton’s journey has been something of an unfathomable one. In the summer of 2007, she was the victim of a brutal attack perpetrated by her ex-husband, Herbert Rodgers. He broke into her home in the dead of night, carrying a baseball bat and a bottle of industrial-strength lye. He used both, and he didn’t stop until Tarleton had sustained what one doctor later described as "the most horrific injury a human being could suffer."

Tarleton awoke from a three-month induced coma in September of that year. Her body, marred by deep chemical burns, was wrapped in bandages and covered in grafts — some taken from cadavers, the rest harvested from her own legs. Her eyelids were gone, as was her left ear. She couldn’t blink, smile, or breathe through her nose.

Her face would never look the way it had before Dr. Bohdan Pomahac

During that coma, doctors performed 38 surgeries to repair what deficits they could. And over a period of five years, she would undergo another 17 operations, including a series of synthetic corneal implants that eventually restored partial vision to one eye. Despite these efforts, Tarleton’s progress eventually stalled — given the limitations of conventional procedures, it was impossible that full facial functions, from movement to sensation, would ever return. And her face, there was no question, would never look the way it had before. "I had forgotten what it was like to look more normal," she says. "I had to accept that I would always look this way, and I had to be okay with that."

Ironically, it wasn’t until Tarleton had cultivated this acceptance, she says, that the prospect of a face transplant emerged. In December of 2011, she received a striking proposition from Dr. Bohdan Pomahac at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He had recently performed the first successful full face-transplant in the US, and he wanted to know if Tarleton would consider the procedure.

It wasn’t an easy answer. Before being approved for a face transplant, Tarleton would need to travel two hours from her home in Vermont to Boston, several times over several months, for extensive physical and psychological exams. Doctors needed to be sure that her immune system could cope with the procedure, and assess the blood vessels, nerves, and muscles deep within her skull. A team of psychological experts would evaluate Tarleton’s mental health and the strength of her support network. The procedure itself would be grueling and dangerous, and the rehabilitation process would be extensive. But the payoff — the prospect of eyes that could blink, a mouth able to kiss — would transform her life.

Several months after that call, Tarleton had cleared every hurdle, and her name was added to a waitlist while surgeons scoured for viable donors. To meet the criteria, a donor had to be brain dead with no prospect for recovery — the harvested tissue needs to be flushed with blood and nutrients until the last possible moment — and be an adequate match for Tarleton’s skin tone and texture, as well as her age and sex. In her case, it took 14 months before that donor, Cheryl, was found.