65
skin-color match, and that made him both
the first African American to undergo a face
transplant and, at 68, the oldest recipient ever.
“Morning by morning, new versions [of me]
unfold,” Chelsea said on the day he was dis-
charged from the hospital in August, nearly a
month after surgery. “[But] I feel like myself.”
Chelsea was having car trouble one Mon-
day night in August 2013, so he pulled onto the
shoulder of a highway outside his home near
Long Beach, Calif. Soon after, a drunk driver
slammed into his car, and it burst into flames.
Chelsea, a sales manager for a rubber-stamp
business, was rushed to a hospital with third-
degree burns covering almost half his body.
After being transferred to the University
of California Irvine Medical Center, Chel-
sea spent four months drifting in and out of
consciousness as doctors fought to save his
life. He had 18 surgeries in that time— mostly
skin grafting for his burns, but also abdomi-
nal operations to treat serious gastrointesti-
nal complications that had developed as his
body struggled to stay alive. Blood- pressure
medications shunted blood flow to his heart
and away from his extremities, leading to tis-
sue death in his lips, nose and fingers. One of
his surgeons, Dr. Victor Joe, called him “one
of the sickest patients we’ve had.”
Chelsea left UC Irvine in December 2013
with his life—but by the end of his recovery he
would lose his lips, the end of his nose, several
fingertips and two-thirds of his intestines. His
face was severely scarred, and his hands were
covered in cadaver skin that matched Chelsea’s
skin tone but never quite mimicked its texture;
Chelsea called it his “snakeskin.” All told, he
would eventually carry the skin of three dif-
ferent people. An organ donor himself before
the accident, he had no idea how difficult re-
placing his skin would prove to be.
The barriers went up long before Chel-
sea was born. In 1932, researchers from the
U.S. Public Health Service launched a study
at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute that would
change the American medical system for de-
cades to come. The trial was covertly designed
for researchers to observe the effects of un-
treated syphilis over the course of four de-
cades. Six hundred black men, mostly share-
croppers, enrolled in the trial, lured by the
promise of free transportation , meals and
medical care. About two-thirds of the men had
syphilis, and half were given the then standard
treatment of arsenic and mercury. The other
‘
African
Americans
still do not
believe the
health care
profession
will take
care of
them.
’
October 2019
JOHN FRANCIS PETERS FOR TIME (2); MIDDLE PHOTO: J. KIELY JR.—LIGHTCHASER PHOTOGRAPHY
