'I Want Everybod

IN JUNE 2021 AARON JAMES WAS ELECTROCUTED ON THE JOB AND LOST AN EYE AND HALF HIS FACE. A GROUNDBREAKING SURGERY HELPED REBUILD HIS LIFE

- EILEEN FINAN and WENDY GROSSMAN KANTOR

Aaron James loves a mirror these days. "I can't go past one without stopping," says James, turning his head from side to side on a recent Zoom call to show off his new face, clearly still in awe by what he sees. "I'm blown away." In fact, he says with deadpan delivery, "I was hoping I might've got in on People's Sexiest Man Alive!"

In the two years after he was electrocuted while on the job as a lineman in June 2021, James had shunned his own reflection. A handsome, burly, bearded man before the accident, he didn't want to see his changed reality written on his face: scar tissue crisscrossing his cheek; a smooth, closed bump where his nose once was; a small hole in place of his mouth; an empty socket where his left eye had been. "It was heartbreaking," he says. "I wanted to keep my old face in my memory. I didn't want that to be my face." But this past May, doctors at NYU Langone Health gave the 46-year-old father an extraordinary transformation 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 what's been done."

The results of the procedure are "remarkably exciting," says Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, a transplant specialist who helped pioneer the procedure and led the team that performed James's surgery. Although more than 45 face transplants have been carried out around the world (Dr. Rodriguez himself has done five, including James's), this marks the first successful whole eye transplant. "It is far more promising than any of us ever expected," says the surgeon, who announced the advancement on Nov. 9 alongside James and the NYU Langone medical team. So far James can't see from the transplanted eye, and doctors are unsure if he ever will, but "the brain is receiving messages from the eyeball," Dr. Rodriguez says. "The eyeball is alive, and that has never been done before."