ROCHEFORT-SUR-MER, France – Six years into a new life with transplanted hands, Denis Chatelier is uniquely placed to give advice to another groundbreaking French transplant patient, a woman learning to live with a new face.
The anti-rejection medication is tough on your body, he says, but it may get easier. Don’t lose yourself in the media frenzy. Don’t pay attention to the stares.
Next week, 39-year-old Chatelier – the world’s first double hand-transplant patient – will meet the woman who had the first partial face transplant on Nov. 27.
“I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a psychoanalyst,” Chatelier said ahead of his meeting with the 38-year-old French woman who, because of privacy laws, is identified in France only as Isabelle. “But what I want to do is show her that later in life, she can be happy.”
Today, the father of five says his hands function at 80 percent. He can shave, drive, brush his teeth, write, dial a telephone, hold his children’s hands, and feel sensations like pain and temperatures. He has one hour of physical therapy a day. His life is nearly back to normal.
It has been a long, tough path.
Potent anti-rejection drugs initially left Chatelier shaky, sweaty, dizzy and suffering from frequent stomach flu. The dose has been reduced but still leaves him vulnerable to illness. Like all transplant patients, he must take the drugs for life.
Chatelier, a former house painter whose forearms were severed in 1996 by an exploding model rocket, underwent 17 hours of transplant surgery in January 2000. Afterward, he felt enormous stress from the pressure of seeing himself everywhere in the media.
Chatelier once wore metal protheses and was taunted with nicknames such as “Robocop.” After the transplant surgery, some people shook his hand and remarked, “That’s not your hand, that’s the hand of a dead man.”
He learned to tune out such remarks.
“You can’t worry about how other people look at you,” Chatelier said. “It’s not other people who heal us, it’s ourselves.”
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