The man with three faces: French patient Jerome Hamon gets his second transplant

In a medical first, a French surgeon says he has performed a second face transplant on the same patient – who is now doing well and even spent a recent weekend in Brittany.

Dr Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris first transplanted a new face onto Jerome Hamon in 2010, when Hamon was in his mid-30s. He suffers from neurofibromatosis type 1, a genetic mutation which causes severely disfiguring tumours and related complications.

But after getting ill in 2015, Hamon was given drugs that interfered with the anti-rejection medicines he was taking for his face transplant.

Last November, the tissue in his transplanted face began to die, leading Lantieri to remove it.

That left Hamon without a face, a condition that Lantieri described as “the walking dead.” Hamon had no eyelids, no ears, no skin and could not speak or eat. He had limited hearing and could express himself only by turning his head slightly, in addition to writing a little.

“If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri said on Tuesday. “We were very concerned about the possibility of a new rejection.”