Books |
The Match: Complete Strangers, a Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformed
Susan Whitman Helfgot with William Novak
By
Published: Oct 20, 2010
Category:
Non Fiction
If they gave parades for people who survived their lives, the marching would never stop.
That line — from a long-ago book by a woman who was a nurse in Vietnam — came back to me as I watched “Boston Med” a few months ago.
Well, I didn’t really watch the show. I couldn’t. Neither could I turn away. I sat, squinting, until I could, through tears, watch a strangely happy ending.
Maybe you have a strong stomach. Maybe you have a thing for medical miracles. Maybe you’re just not a wimp like me.
But consider: A man waiting for a subway. He falls. His face lands on the third rail. Poof! The third-degree burns are the least of it – he loses his nose, cheeks, teeth, part of his mouth, muscle, bone and nerves. What’s left: a crater in the center of his vaporized face.
And you had a hard time watching “The Elephant Man?”
Now consider: a man in a hospital with a chronic heart condition. He needs a transplant. And gets one. Then — cruel irony — he dies. He was an organ donor, so doctors harvest his organs, including his heart.
But there is one more organ to transplant: his face.
Couldn’t make this up if you tried, could you?
Here’s a sample of the “Boston Med” show about these two men and the widow who gave her consent for the most intimate transplant of all, the first-ever face transplant in America:
Now that story is a book. “The Match: Complete Strangers, a Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformed” is the minute-by-minute account of Joseph Helfgot’s death and James Maki’s new life. The author, appropriately, is Helfgot’s widow. She wrote it with the help of my friend William Novak, the king of celebrity ghostwriters — who assures me that, this time, the lead author really did write the bulk of her book. (To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.)
I started the book expecting to turn away. Three hours later, I set it down, in awe at Susan Whitman Helfgot’s courage. And more, her willingness to tell all in the interest of a cause she never expected to champion: organ donation.
The range of this book is astonishing — she’s intercutting three stories. First, the story of her marriage, her husband’s sickness, his death. Then the story of James Maki, a guy who’d pretty much wasted his life. And then the story of the surgeons and the medical team that, in a daylong marathon, performed an operation that would have been impossible only a few years ago and seems unbelievable even now.
Because the focus shifts so quickly, the book reads like a thriller. And it is. But more, it’s a powerful account of people in crisis, when there’s no time to think and all you really have to go on is your character.
So often these days — especially in public life — we see people, one after another, revealing the worst aspect of their character. They’re stupid and arrogant, heartless and proud of it. Not Susan Whitman Helfgot. She’s simply magnificent.
