A man whose face was scammed by a shot revealed what he looks like after his life -changing face transplantation operation.
Andy Sandness, now 40, aimed a gun at the bottom of his chin at the age of 21 and pulled the tractor two days before Christmas in 2006 in the midst of a fight with depression.
The shot destroyed his mouth, nose, lips and a large part of his bottom, but the power caused his head to pull backwards – and the bullet missed his brain.
For four months in the hospital, the resident of Wyoming went through 14 first operations to try to reconstruct his face, but because of the immense trauma he was left with a mouth no wider than an inch and only one tooth, which means that he could hardly eat and had no smell.
Opposite Constant looks in public, Sandness, an electrician, struggled with his appearance for the following decade until doctors in the Mayo Clinic offered him a face transplant – the first ever performed by the hospital.
In a debilitating 56 urie procedure with nearly 30 doctors and nurses, a donor view was transplanted on sandiness under his eyebrows.
Now, after the transplant of 2016, Sandness has revealed how his new face changed his life and led him to get married and found a family.
“One of the main reasons why I did it was to have a woman, having children and one day to have my own family,” he said in a new book, Face in the mirror.
Before the procedure, Andy Sandness struggled with his appearance (shown above in June 2016 just before he underwent the face transplant)
“I never expected that that would happen in my entire life,” he said, and added, “I don’t have to live in fear anymore. I can go out and be myself. I can be myself again. ‘
After the successful operation – the 12th face transplantation in the US – Sandness told the Daily Mail how he got the feeling in most of the face, and now can feel when people touch him and when it is hot or cold outside.
He is also able to move facial muscles for the first time in a decade, so that he can smile, kiss his lips and kiss his nose and eyebrows when he is angry. Sandness even said he received about 70 to 75 percent of his movement.
“The thing that helps the most is that I have my original eyes and my original eyebrows,” he said, “so that things have never been changed, and that makes a lot of exercise possible.”
After the operation, he quickly added his extrovert personality, enjoying hockey competitions and meals in restaurants without people stopping and staring.
Then, in August 2017, he started dating Mayo Clinic nurse Kim, whom he met in the hospital.
In May 2020 the couple married and in October that same year they welcomed their first child, a boy named Wyatt Lee. They later welcomed a daughter, Grace Catherine.
When asked if he has credited the face transplant to help them bring them together and founding a family, Sandness said that this was something that the couple debated all the time.
“My wife, she says we would be 100 percent married without it,” he said, “and that’s how I met her. But I’m not that sure for me. ‘
His plastic surgeon, Dr. Samir Mardini, said: ‘We helped him become normal … When I see him, I can’t believe what he looks like. I look at the movements in his face and the emotions he expresses – they seem so natural and effortless.
“I think of the miracle that these movements of a face that once belonged to someone else, and that person is no longer with us, but this face lives the life of another person.”
Sandness depicted January 2017, about six months after undergoing the operation
Sandness is depicted above in a family photo with his wife Kim, son Wyatt Lee, daughter Grace Catherine and the family dog
Talking about the operation on the Podcast of the Mayo Clinic last month, he said: ‘To be able to lead a normal life again! I could get married. I have two children. I can go swimming, I can actually eat everything I want in addition to grapefruit [because it interferes with anti-rejection drugs].
“I have a functioning face. If I smile, I can smile. Then the aesthetic part of it is also a major role, because when I go into the store, people like: “Oh, you got in a car wreck?”
After Sandness was brought to the Mayo Clinic for the first time in December 2006, he was sure that this would not be possible.
Although doctors were able to save his life, they could not save his face – led him to deal with for years. People would stare at him at supermarkets, while children would ask what was wrong with him.
Apart from his work, he became a recluse and spent most of his time in the hills that hunt and fish on moose. He had virtually no social life.
He was also plagued by his prosthetic nose, which would continue to fall and get discolored if he was in the sun for too long. And his little mouth had him wrestling to eat, causing him to cut all his food into tiny pieces.
In the next five years, Sandness continued to go to the hospital for corrective operations, but his appearance was far from what he looked like earlier.
Despite the problems, Sandness said that he really wanted to live after suicide attempt.
Sandness (depicted in 2025) is now married and had two children, whom he credit to his new face
Then in May 2012 he received a phone call from Dr. Mardini who would change his life for the course of his life – it was to suggest the face transplant, but it would take years until it flourished.
Sandness grabbed the chance of and after the Mayo clinic face transplant program was officially opened, he was implemented by a battery tests to assess his mental health before he was approved in January 2016.
In July that same year he received a phone call stating that they had found a potential competition for him.
The hospital was connected to the Van Caden family ‘Rudy’ Ross, 21, with a similar skin color that had stated that he wanted to donate his organs in the case of his death.
Ross died by suicide that same month, after he had shot himself. He was survived by HIs eight months pregnant, the 19-year-old woman who made the decision to allow the transplant.
A few days later Sandness was taken in an operation.
The surgeons break the nerves, tissue and muscle on the donor view before they transplant everything on sand and connect the new face with all its vital nerves and blood vessels.
Three weeks after the operation he was not allowed to see his new face – all mirrors and telephones were removed while doctors waited for the swelling to reduce.
When the new face was finally unveiled, Sandness could not speak, but wrote on a sheet of paper that it exceeded my expectations’.
Sandness depicted before his suicide attempt
He met Lilly Ross, the wife of the 21-year-old man from whom he received the new face
In November 2017, 16 months after the operation, he met Lilly Ross, the wife of his donor.
She was worried that he might look like her deceased husband, but said that, apart from a characteristic bald patch in the middle of the beard, he didn’t look like him at all.
Ross said that seeing the transplant ‘made me so proud’ because she was able to see how it had changed the life of sandy.
Asked for the injury, he said: ‘The only thing I will say is just that the effect it has given to my family, that my mother has, she had PTSD afterwards.
‘And my brother, he said it was perfect after the transplant and that:’ You don’t know how relieved we are that you can live a normal life. ‘
‘You don’t care in that situation, but it will fuck with your family. I mean, the police don’t come in and clean that stuff, you have to clean it up, you have to, it was really difficult for my family. ‘
He added: ‘I will never forget to go to the Charlton building to meet everyone. I jumped in the elevator and there is a small child in it.
‘Normally the children would just hold their mother and hide behind them. The little boy just looked at me and smiled and I just waved at him.
“Then I knew it was successful, that we got almost everything we wanted.”
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