Aaron James Lost Half His Face from Electrocution. He Just Received the First-Ever Eye and Face Transplant (Exclusive)

While working as a lineman two years ago, James was electrocuted and lost half his face. In a ground-breaking surgery, doctors gave him a new one — and helped rebuild his life. “For the first time since the accident, I don’t want to wear a mask,” he says. “I want everybody to see me”

“I can’t go past one without stopping,” says the 46-year-old from Arkansas, turning his head from side to side on a Zoom interview to show off his new face, clearly still in awe by what he sees. “I’m just blown away.”

For two years, James avoided his reflection after he was electrocuted while on the job as a lineman in June of 2021. A handsome, burly, bearded man before the accident, James didn’t want to be reminded of the changed reality written on his face: Scar tissue criss-crossing his cheek, a smooth, closed bump where his nose once was, the small hole that was all that remained of his mouth, an empty socket where his left eye had been.

“It was pretty heartbreaking,” he tells PEOPLE “I wanted to keep my old face in my memory. I didn’t want that to be my face. I didn’t care to see it.”

But five months ago, doctors at NYU Langone Health gave James his confidence back by performing the world’s first eye and face transplant. “For the first time since the accident, I don’t want to wear a mask,” James says. “I want everybody to see me.”

The results of the procedure are “remarkably exciting,” Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, a transplant specialist who helped pioneer the procedure and who led the NYU Langone team that performed the surgery, tells PEOPLE. While more than 45 face transplants have been performed around the world (Dr. Rodriguez himself has done five, including James’s), this marks the first time surgeons have successfully transplanted a whole eye.

“It is far more promising than any of us ever expected,” says Dr. Rodriguez, who announced the advancement at a press conference today alongside James and the NYU Langone team. So far, James has no vision in the eye and doctors are unsure if he ever will, but “the brain is receiving messages from the eyeball. The eyeball is alive and that has never been done before.”

Before James became the center of a medical miracle, he was working as an electrical lineman for a contracting company, on the road and away from his wife and teenage daughter in Hot Springs Village, Ark., for up to three weeks at a time.

James, an Army National Guard veteran who served in Kuwait, Egypt and Iraq, was on the job in an elevated bucket near Tulsa, Okla., helping to transfer wires to a new electrical pole in June 2021, when he hit his face onto a live wire while holding a neutral wire. The shock of more than 7,000 volts of electricity shooting through his body blew off his thumb and burned him from the inside out.

For James, the accident “is like a dream, all jumbled up,” he says. “All I remember is going to work and waking up six weeks later.”

When his wife Meagan first got the call that her husband was in the hospital a four and a half hour drive away, she was told, “The only thing that we can promise you is that he won’t die before you get here.”

The trauma triggered strokes, kidney failure, burned his gums and destroyed his left eye, nose and the lower part of his face. Doctors had to remove seven teeth and amputate his left arm at the mid-humerus bone, and James had to learn to walk again. “There were so many unknowns on what his outlook would be,” says Meagan. “They truly did not know. They were like, ‘He’ll never eat the same, he’ll probably never talk. He could possibly not come off the ventilator.’ But I thought, ‘He’s fighting and as long as he’s fighting, I’ll be here fighting.’”

Aaron admits there were some dark days. “I got pretty down and went through the whole ‘Why me?’ I broke down and I cried. I think that’s a natural way to react over something like this,” he says. “But it didn’t last long. Everybody around me kept me up and motivated. They didn’t let me dwell on it too long.”

At home, his family, who set up a GoFund Me page to help with medical expenses, would gently joke with each other – his daughter, Allie, now 18, posted videos on her social media doing silly dances with her dad — but his limitations were trying. “All I could eat was pureed soup from a straw because I couldn’t open my mouth,” says Aaron, who lost 75 pounds from his 245-pound frame.

Going out in public meant attracting attention that was sometimes painful. “I just looked straight ahead and didn’t really pay attention to people,” says Aaron, who would cover his face with a mask and an eye patch to hide his injuries. “But because I survived this, I thought there has to be a purpose, and I wanted to find out what that is. That kept me going.”

And once he learned of the possibility of a new face, his hopes rose even further. His worker compensation company knew of the work that Dr. Rodriguez at NYU Langone had done and helped connect James with the hospital to see if he might qualify for a transplant.

“He was an ideal candidate,” says Dr. Rodriguez, who met Aaron just two months after his accident. “He had a deformity that was unreconstructable. He wasn’t able to eat, and he was breathing through his trach [tube]. If we could do this, it would be life-changing.” And, he says, equally important, Aaron had a strong support system, which the surgeon witnessed first-hand while visiting the family in Arkansas. “They were all in. They’re behind him.”

He told the family that there were major risks to the operation — particularly in transplanting an eye. “Eyes can develop what’s called sympathetic ophthalmia, a severe pain issue. It also could have a different immune response,” Dr. Rodriguez says. “A rejection in the eye could set off a severe acute rejection in the face. This was basically unknown territory. I told him that it’s never been performed. I don’t even know if we could do it. The transplant of the eye could complicate things. It may kill you.”

But Aaron was ready to take a chance. “I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’” His one request: that his new face would allow him to grow back his beard.

Just three months after Aaron was listed as a potential transplant recipient, he was matched with a donor, a man in his 30s who, according to organ procurement organization LiveOnNY donated both his face and eye to Aaron and saved three other lives as well with donations of his kidneys, liver and pancreas.

The surgery, which took place May 27, lasted 21 hours, and Aaron remained in the hospital for 37 days. Now, “he’s doing great,” says Dr. Rodriguez. “His face is starting to move. He can start squinting. The eyelid’s still down, but you can see his muscles moving.”

And Aaron even has his beard back. “I couldn’t wait for this day to get here,” he says. “I can open my mouth, I can eat, I can smell everything, I can taste everything. I couldn’t have expected anything better. When I look in the mirror, it almost don’t even look like I’ve had a surgery. I’m still in shock.”

Aaron and his wife have been amazed at how closely the donor face matches Aaron’s. “The match was insanely good. I mean, even the skin tone match is just impeccable,” says Meagan.

And their gratitude for the family that gave him such a precious gift is beyond words, says Aaron. “I think about them every single day,” he says. “I couldn’t say thank you enough. There’s no words that can cover it. There are bad things going on in this world and you can lose hope. But when something like this happens, it brings hope back. It makes you want to be a better person for them.”

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