{"id":21584,"date":"2018-09-24T12:18:09","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T17:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=21584"},"modified":"2018-09-22T16:01:58","modified_gmt":"2018-09-22T21:01:58","slug":"katie-stubblefield-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/tartan-news\/2018\/09\/24\/katie-stubblefield-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Katie Stubblefield Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0On March 24 2014, Katie Stubblefield, 18, had a failed suicide attempt that would bring her not only pain but the loss of her entire face. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Due to circumstances beyond her control, Stubblefield would lock herself in the bathroom of her brother\u2019s home and shoot herself under the chin with her brother Robert\u2019s \u00a0.308-caliber hunting rifle. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Robert found her instantly and recalled the memory, saying the first thing he noticed was that \u201cher face was gone.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0According to National Geographic, \u201cThe bullet was a pernicious thief. To get a measure of what it stole from Katie, hold your hands up to your face, palms out, your thumbs touching beneath your chin and your index fingers touching between your eyebrows. Your hands are framing the part of Katie\u2019s face she lost.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0The report continues: \u201cGone were part of her forehead; her nose and sinuses; her mouth, except for the corners of her lips; and much of her mandible and maxilla, the bones that make up the jaws and front of the face. Her eyes remained, but they were askew and badly damaged.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span> Stubblefield was first operated on in Memphis, Tenn. and saved against all odds. The doctors ended up having to try grafting skin from her abdomen to help close the gaping wound, though unsuccessfully. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Stubblefield was a small girl and the doctors who first operated on her were worried they wouldn’t have enough tissues to work with to reconstruct what was basically her entire face; Stubblefield was only 105 pounds. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Brian Gastman, the first clinic doctor to see Katie said in his 27 years of practice Stubblefield\u2019s injuries were \u201cone of the worst face traumas he\u2019d ever encountered. Beyond the wound to her face, she had traumatic brain injury from the bullet\u2019s concussive force to her frontal lobe, optic nerve, and pituitary gland.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0It took a team of 15 specialists to save Stubblefield\u2019s life. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Over the course of many surgeries the doctors were able to stabilize Stubblefield and patched what was left of her face. Stubblefield had never seen this face, but she had come to know it by touch, she calls it \u201cthe second of her young life, Shrek.\u201d Throughout her trauma, Stubblefield kept a bright optimistic disposition. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Stubblefield was on a transplant waiting list for three years until a donor came along, Andrea Schneider, a 31-year-old woman and organ donor who had recently passed away. She was a match. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0May 4, 2017 was the day Stubblefield was told she was set for a full transplant. At 7:30 a.m., 11 surgeons gathered in OR-20, as the donor was wheeled into OR-19. Sixteen hours into a transplant operation at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, surgeons finish the intricate task of removing the face from an organ donor. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\"\"
\nNational Geographic reports that \u201c Katie will be the youngest person to receive a face transplant in the United States. Her transplant, the clinic\u2019s third and the 40th known in the world, will be one of the most extensive, making her a lifelong subject in the study of this still experimental surgery.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0The surgery didn’t come without its hiccups though, they did run into some complications. For example, the donor’s face was larger than Stubblefield’s and her scar tissue took up space. There wasn\u2019t enough room for all of the donor\u2019s muscles and vessels and the skin tone wasn\u2019t a match, which would cause the transplant to stand out. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe surgeons conferred, some of them stopping to examine the 3D models that had been made from CT scans of the two heads,\u201d the National Geographic report states. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cA majority thought they should give Katie the donor\u2019s full face. It was clear that it would look a lot better. A few on the team argued that more tissue and skin might mean she would have to take higher doses of the strong anti rejection drugs she\u2019d be on for the rest of her life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0It continues: \u201cWorse, in the case of a rejection so acute that her face had to be removed, she wouldn\u2019t have enough tissue on her body for reconstructive surgery.\u201d <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0Stubblefield\u2019s parents were brought into the fold and eventually decided Katie would want the entire face so that\u2019s what the surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic went ahead with. <\/span>
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0At 3 p.m., 31 hours after surgery on the donor started, the surgeons finished suturing the top layer of skin, attaching the entire face. After the surgery was complete Stubblefield’s family came into see her in the intensive care unit and were amazed at their daughter and little sister\u2019s third face in just over three years. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Her brother\u2019s first words were about the new feature Stubblefield acquired a small dimple on her chin \u201c like Kirk Douglas.\u201d<\/span>
\n<\/span> After the many months of physical therapy and various revision surgeries are completed Stubblefield says she intends to pick up right where she left off starting with college. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0Her next goal is to obtain a career in counseling. She says \u201cSo many people have helped me; now I want to help other people.\u201d She hopes to speak to teenagers about suicide and the value of life, but for now she is focused on her recovery.<\/span><\/p>\n

Haley Edwards<\/strong>
\n<\/span>Reporter<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0On March 24 2014, Katie Stubblefield, 18, had a failed suicide attempt that would bring her not only pain but the loss of her entire face. \u00a0 \u00a0Due to circumstances beyond her control, Stubblefield would lock herself in the bathroom of her brother\u2019s home and shoot herself under the chin with her brother Robert\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10416,"featured_media":21618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2105,3],"tags":[2280,2732,177,2733],"class_list":["post-21584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","category-tartan-news","tag-haley-edwards","tag-katie-stubblefield","tag-medical","tag-national-geographic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Clarion-V42-Ed05-Katie-Stubblefield-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-5C8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21584"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21619,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21584\/revisions\/21619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}