How to Adapt to Your Face Transplant

Just last month, Carmen Blandin had a remarkable dream. In it she saw, for the first time, not her old face in the mirror—the one she had for the first 38 years of her life—but the new face she received in a transplant three years ago. “I actually saw me with my new face,” she says. “Finally.” In the dream, she was smiling. Carmen became severely disfigured one evening in 2007, at her home in rural Vermont, when her estranged husband doused her with industrial strength lye while she lay in bed. She still identifies more with her original face, she says, but that doesn’t mean she wants it back.

That Carmen has, in some measure, moved on from her old identity by eschewing any, later adapted to film, a scientist creates a new face for himself following a terrible accident, and begins to live as a new man. And then there is, of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.