WIDOW DONATES HUSBAND'S FACE FOR TRANSPLANT
Standing in a stately Mayo Clinic library, Lilly Ross reached out and touched the face of a stranger, prodding the rosy cheeks and eyeing the hairless gap in a chin she once had known
so well. "That's why he always grew it so long, so he could try to mesh it together on the chin," she told Andy Sandness, as he shut his eyes and braced for the tickle of her touch on new nerve endings in the face that had been her husband's.
Sixteen months after transplant surgery gave Sandness the face that had belonged to Calen "Rudy" Ross, he met the woman who had agreed to donate her high school sweetheart's visage to a man who lived nearly a decade without
one.
The two came together last month in a meeting arranged by the Mayo Clinic, the same place where Sandness underwent a 56-hour surgery that was the clinic's first such transplant. With her toddler Leonard in tow, Ross strode toward Sandness, tears welling in her eyes as they tightly embraced. Ross had fretted before the meeting, fearful of the certain reminders of her husband, who took his own life.
But her stress quickly melted away — without
Calen's eyes, forehead or strong cheeks, Sandness didn't look like him, she told herself. Instead, she saw a man whose life had changed through her husband's gift, newly confident after 10 years of hiding from mirrors and staring eyes.
"It made me proud," Ross said of the 32-year-old Sandness. "The way Rudy saw himself ... he didn't see himself like that."
Sandness and Calen Ross lived lives full of hunting,
fishing and exploring the outdoors before their struggles consumed them, 10 years and hundreds of miles apart.
Sandness put a rifle below his chin in late 2006 in his native Wyoming and pulled the trigger, destroying most of his face. Ross shot himself and died in southwestern Minnesota a decade later...READ MORE + SEE VIDEO
