[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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