WATCH: Burned Firefighter Receives New Face From Fallen Brooklyn Cyclist

A Mississippi firefighter whose face was severely burned in a 2001 house fire has been transformed by a face transplant he received over the summer at the NYU Langone Medical Center.

The firefighter, Patrick Hardison; his donor, 26-year-old Clinton Hill bike mechanic David Rodebaugh; their surgeon, NYU’s Eduardo Rodriguez; and their shared face are all profiled this week in a New York Magazine longform.

“This would be the most extensive face transplant yet performed — including the entire scalp, ears, and eyelids,” the magazine reported.

Below, a scene from the extraordinary medical procedure.

“For the moment, the face belongs to no one. It floats in a bowl of icy, hemodynamic preserving solution, paused midway on its journey from one operating room to another, from a 26-year-old Brooklyn bike mechanic who’d been declared brain-dead 48 hours earlier to a 41-year-old Mississippi fireman whose face had burned off in a blaze 14 years ago. The mechanic’s face, though nearly flat, still bears a few reminders of its former owner: a stubble of dark-blond hair, pierced ears, a hook-shaped scar at the spot where surgeons had entered his skull trying to save his life. A surgeon reaches his gloved hands into the blood-tinged liquid and kneads the face, draining the last of the mechanic’s blood. Then he lifts the face up to a camera, showing off his handiwork. As he raises it, it seems to inflate and take the shape of a face again, one that no longer resembles the cyclist. The forehead is shorter, the cheeks puffier. The lips have fallen into a crescent, as if smiling. The face looks like it will when, an hour later, it is fitted over the raw skull of the fireman waiting in the next room.”

New York Mag reports that the donor, Rodebaugh, was a loyal and well-loved member of Brooklyn’s “hard-core bike-messenger community.” On July 22 of this year, he was thrown from his bike while riding recklessly near Myrtle and Dekalb avenues in Bushwick.

Read the full story at New York Magazine.