Joe’s surgery was a miracle for his family and the health industry, as doctors had initially given the procedure a six percent success rate. He is the first in the world to successfully receive a new face and both hands from the same donor – an unidentified man in Delaware. Isabelle Dinoire became the world’s first face plant recipient in France in 2005. She died 11 years later from cancer. It has been attempted twice before; first in Paris in 2009 but the patient died from complications a month later. In Boston in 2011, a woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee received hands and a face from the same donor but her body rejected the hands and they were removed.
