[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 153 (Wednesday, October 30, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7666-S7667]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MORNING BUSINESS
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TRIBUTE TO CARMEN TARLETON
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President. I would like to take a moment to pay
tribute to a Vermont woman who personifies inspirational. Carmen
Tarleton's journey as a survivor of domestic violence began nearly 6
years ago, when her estranged husband broke into her home, attacked her
with a baseball bat and doused her with industrial-strength lye. She
suffered severe burns over 80 percent of her body.
I have followed Carmen's recovery with great interest and even
greater awe. Despite the scars that left her blinded and severely
disfigured, Carmen made no effort to hide the effects of that attack.
She never sought pity, nor did she dwell on the past. Instead, Carmen
wrote a book and went on television, talking bravely and candidly about
her long road back. She learned how to play the banjo and piano, and
through the many surgeries and long hospital stays, Carmen's
determination and spirit remained unbroken.
Last February, Carmen underwent a miraculous face transplant at
Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which was detailed in an
October 26 front-page story in The New York Times. As that piece
pointed out, ``There is evidence that Ms. Tarleton's new face is more
than just donated tissue, (it) is becoming part of who she is.''
I ask unanimous consent to have The New York Times article inserted
in the Record. I believe everyone will be as inspired by Carmen
Tarleton as I have been.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Oct. 25, 2013]
For Victim of Ghastly Crime, a New Face, a New Beginning
(By Abby Goodnough)
Thetford, Vt.--At 1:30 a.m. on Valentine's Day this year,
Carmen Tarleton left her rural home here and drove through
the frigid dark to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Her doctor had called hours earlier with the news she had
been waiting for: a suitable donor had been found. She would
get a new face.
Almost six years had passed since her estranged husband
broke into her house one spring night, beat her with a
baseball bat and soaked her with industrial lye that he
squirted from a dish-soap bottle. The attack nearly blinded
Ms. Tarleton, a nurse and mother of two, and burned her
beyond recognition. She lost her eyelids, upper lip and left
ear. What remained of her face and much of her body was a
knobby patchwork of scar tissue and skin grafts, painful to
look at and far more painful to live with.
Now, after overcoming some initial fears, she was ready to
receive someone else's features. After 15 hours of transplant
surgery, Ms. Tarleton, 45, emerged from the operating room
with what looked to her mother, Joan VanNorden, like a puffy,
surreal mask. At first she wanted to faint as she stared at
the new face, smooth and freckled, stitched to her daughter's
pale scalp. But when Ms. Tarleton started talking in her old
familiar voice--``Can't you just get in here?''--Mrs.
VanNorden relaxed.
``I said, This is who Carmen is now,' and it really looked
beautiful,'' she recalled. ``Although it didn't look anything
like her, it was her face.''
Face transplants are still an experimental procedure, the
first having taken place just eight years ago in France. Some
two dozen full or partial transplants have been completed
worldwide, including five at Brigham and Women's, which used
nearly $4 million in research grants from the Department of
Defense to do four of the surgeries. Arteries, veins, nerves
and muscles from the donor face must be painstakingly
connected to the recipient's, in what Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, Ms.
Tarleton's chief transplant surgeon, called ``by far the most
complicated operation that I do.''
Yet the psychological impact of a face transplant is
perhaps as far-reaching as the surgical one. Unlike a kidney
or liver or heart, a donated face is visible to all,
challenging recipients and their loved ones to incorporate an
entirely new countenance into long-held perceptions of a
person's identity.
Ms. Tarleton's appearance is still evolving: her scalp was
so badly burned that hair will never return to parts of her
head, but her donor's hair, the same shade of brown as her
own, is growing around her forehead and temples. Her right
eye remains closed, and her left droops. Her face is
sometimes masklike, betraying little emotion, because the
muscles are still reconnecting and she cannot yet move them
well. And that mask, oddly enough, looks like neither her nor
the woman who donated it.
But eight months after the operation, there is evidence
that Ms. Tarleton's new face is more than just donated
tissue, and is becoming part of who she is.
When her family thinks, or even dreams, about her, they
imagine her new visage. ``When someone at work asks me, How's
Carmen?' the picture that comes up in my mind more and more
is that face,'' said Ms. Tarleton's sister, Kesstan Blandin.
Yet for Ms. Tarleton herself, the process of acceptance has
been trickier. For one thing,
[[Page S7667]]
her poor vision keeps her from seeing herself clearly unless
she holds a mirror up close. ``I don't yet feel it is my
face,'' she wrote in a recent blog post. ``I feel like I am
still borrowing it.''
Ms. Tarleton's former husband, Herbert Rodgers, 58, pleaded
guilty to a charge of maiming and is serving a prison
sentence of at least 30 years. Mr. Rodgers told the police
that he had been angry at Ms. Tarleton, believing she was
seeing another man after they separated.
Ms. Tarleton underwent a number of reconstructive
surgeries, but with little success. When Dr. Pomahac called
in May 2011 to propose a face transplant, Ms. Tarleton's mind
first leapt to a ``Twilight Zone'' episode that had jarred
her as a child, about a man who could change his appearance
to look like other people.
``Initially I felt that it was very sci-fi,'' she said in a
recent interview while curled on the couch in the modest home
she shares with her two daughters. But she and her family
started researching, and after a few weeks of weighing the
pros and cons--for one thing, she is likely to be on
immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of her life, raising her
risk of infection and cancer--Ms. Tarleton decided to forge
ahead.
After a number of trips to Boston for physical and
psychological screening to determine if she was a good
candidate, she got on the donor list that fall. ``It was like
a big surprise, a big gift,'' she said. ``I'd already
accepted my disfigurement, fine. But I accepted it believing
there wasn't an alternative.''
The things Ms. Tarleton wanted from a new face were more
pragmatic than aesthetic. Tight bands of scars ringed her
neck, causing debilitating pain. She drooled constantly and
could not blink, jeopardizing a synthetic cornea in her left
eye. And with her face frozen from scarring, it was hard for
others to read her emotions.
For a time, she was devastated that she could not see ``the
old me,'' as she put it. But she moved on, writing a book
about her physical and emotional recovery from the attack and
speaking publicly about the experience. She seemed mostly
unconcerned about her appearance.
But in December 2012, she gained a more urgent desire for a
new face. She had started taking piano lessons at a music
shop not far from her home. Her teacher was Sheldon Stein, an
earthy, soft-spoken musician with whom she felt an instant
affinity. The feeling, it turned out, was mutual. The two say
they are in love.
``I kept looking in the mirror all of a sudden when I met
Sheldon,'' she said. ``I wasn't insecure before. But now--now
you have feelings for somebody and now you have something to
lose, when before, one of the reasons I did so well is I had
nothing to lose anymore.''
After the operation, she went through a harrowing three
weeks when her immune system rejected the face. But
medications helped her accept the new tissue. And some of the
improvements she had hoped for came shortly after. Her neck
pain disappeared, and her left eyelid, immobile for years,
began to blink again. The drooling diminished, and is likely
to stop once she gets more feeling in her lips.
The transplant did not make Ms. Tarleton look like her
donor, Cheryl Denelli Righter of North Adams, Mass., who died
at 56 after a stroke. That is a typical outcome for face
transplant recipients, partly because their bone structures
are different from their donors'. Mysteriously, she now has a
cleft in her chin, something neither Ms. Denelli Righter nor
Ms. Tarleton's old face had.
Yet to Ms. Denelli Righter's daughter, something of her
mother lives on in Ms. Tarleton's new face. ``I get to feel
my mother's skin again, I get to see my mother's freckles,
and through you, I get to see my mother live on,'' the
daughter, Marinda Righter, told Ms. Tarleton in May. The two
have kept in touch, and Ms. Tarleton said she could feel Ms.
Righter's loss ``so strongly''--another complicating factor
as she adjusts.
One Tuesday in August, Ms. Tarleton made her way yet again
to Brigham and Women's, where doctors monitor the level of
anti-rejection medications in her blood and take biopsies of
the skin on her neck--which is the donor's--to look for any
sign of rejection.
Ms. Tarleton has undergone nearly 60 operations, mostly
skin grafts, at Brigham and Women's and has visited 21 times
since her latest release in March. On this day she was
exhausted, recovering from a bad headache the previous night
and a recent fall that had left her with an aching foot. But
she had a bit of good news for her doctors.
``If I put my head on Sheldon's chest, I can feel his
hair,'' she said, ``and I couldn't before.''
Ms. Tarleton also met with Bridget Bowler, a speech
therapist who is helping her learn to move her new lips--
where nerve function typically takes the longest to return in
transplant recipients--and practice facial expressions. She
still has an air of the ventriloquist when she speaks, a
habit that Ms. Bowler is trying to help her shake.
``One of these days in the near future,'' Ms. Tarleton
said, ``when I start to cry or I laugh, you're going to be
able to tell by looking at me how I feel.''
These days, Ms. Tarleton has returned to her hard-charging
self. Her summer included speaking engagements, weekend road
trips and late-night jam sessions with Mr. Stein and his
musician friends. She decided to take up the banjo in
addition to the piano, because she wanted to join in the
jams. ``Our whole lives,'' she said, ``are just about
experience.''
Ms. Blandin said Ms. Tarleton's new face has helped mute
the grief she still feels about the horrible damage done by
the lye attack. ``Now I just feel like a warm nostalgia: I
know you and I haven't forgotten you,'' she said of her
sister's original face. ``She's still Carmen in some ways,
but in other ways she's someone new and the face transplant
represents that.''
But Ms. Tarleton's daughters, Liza, 21, and Hannah, 19, who
live with her in a red barn that has been converted to
apartments, on a hill thick with wildflowers, were more
matter-of-fact when discussing her transformation, perhaps
intentionally.
``Mom's going to do what she's going to do,'' Liza said.
Hannah chimed in. ``And we're going to get used to it,''
she said, laughing.
``And we're going to support it,'' Liza added, ``for
sure.''
With that, Liza got up to make her mother a hot dog. Ms.
Tarleton took her spot on the couch, a barely perceptible
smile flickering across her face.
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