Baby Face

M. T. Brown was the first adult recipient of a human baby face transplant. The circumstances surrounding how his face went missing were a mystery. All he could remember was that he was walking to the office on Tuesday and the next thing he knew his face was just gone.

Being that Dr. Brown was a very important under cover geneticist, he was fast tracked to the head of the queue at the reconstructive surgery ward. His fellow doctors and scientists would do anything to get him back on track so he could meet with investors, world leaders, and the Nobel committee. They were so focused on getting him back to work that they allowed many ethical grey areas to be temporarily swept under the rug. One such area was the use of brain dead patients that hadn’t been qualified or released to be used as donors, another was using patients that were in waking comas and simply drugging them to make them appear lifeless, another was capturing vagrants and ragamuffins directly from the streets and drugging or even lobotomizing them so they could be used as possible face donors. Finally, they started rounding up minors who were lost or seemed to be “up to no good”. Some who disapproved of these methods still agreed that this needed to be done for the sake of efficiency and variety, both of which were very important to Dr. Brown. Besides, they were able to round up over 80 possibilities in less than 7 hours.

They would load the possible donors on carts and parade them in front of Mr. Brown, but he just kept waving them away and saying no, no, no. After running through all the adults, they finally put all the youngsters on the carts and began wheeling them in, every one was a “no”. They were beginning to get frustrated that they had done all this work seemingly for nothing, when one of the doctors remembered that he had seen a baby laying in a basket earlier on the street corner on his way in to work. He left it there because he didn’t think he would need it. I mean, who could even know that events would possibly have unfolded in such a way, and that a seemingly useless baby would be so urgently needed. He jumped into his fancy Italian sports car (that was normally for picking up the ladies) and raced to the street corner hoping, wishing, dreaming and even praying that the baby would still be there. To the astonishment and titillation of the doctor the baby was still there! He was so excited that he had found the baby that he accidentally slammed its left foot and right hand in the door, no big deal though, they wouldn’t be needing those anyway.

The scientist was frustrated that the baby was screaming and fussing so much that he threatened the baby in no uncertain terms. The baby finally shut up just in time to sneak it into the hospital. The surgeons quickly drugged the baby and didn’t even bother to place it on the presentation cart. They ran with the baby and as one of the interns held it up, Dr Brown excitedly yelled, “That’s the face!! That’s the face!” The doctors and scientists breathed a stunted sigh of relief, then someone spoke up, “we’ve got a lot of work to do lads, first we’ve got to kill this baby!”

Once the baby was killed, they quickly but carefully removed its face. Two of the best interns they had were assigned to the task of making this whole thing look like an accident. First they stole a forklift, a vehicle that would be totally untraceable back to them. Next they collected old liquor bottles and spread them around inside the cabin. They wanted this baby to appear to have been drunk at the time of impact, because they knew the media would run with the whole “faceless baby” thing, but a “faceless drunk baby” seems like a much less sympathetic character.

After hours on the operating table, Dr. Brown was finally lucid enough to move a little on his own. The surgeons explained to him that even with all of the advancements that have been made in accelerated healing, the process was far from over and the sutures would need to remain in place for a month. Then they peeled off the wrapping to reveal the new face of Dr. Brown.

First, Dr. Brown faced the group and they marveled at how well their fellow surgeons did at grafting a baby face onto a full grown man’s head, but they marveled even more at Dr. Brown, and how he instinctively knew that this face would suit him so well. Finally, Dr. Brown turned to the mirror and at seeing himself, he screamed, “That’s the face!!! That’s the face!!!” then he stabbed himself in the forehead with a scalpel and began cutting chunks out of his new face. Everyone started to scream, but then remembered that they had seen and done some slightly unethical things that evening themselves, so they regained composure pretty quickly.

Dr. Brown however, was literally and figuratively coming apart. They quickly sedated him and started to investigate what could have gone wrong. Finally one of the doctors said, he knew what was going on. “Where’s that baby?” he said. One of the interns came forward and said, “we put it in a forklift and drove it over a cliff.” The interns and the doctor raced to the scene of the “disposal” in a really cool Lamborghini stretch limo. When they arrived at the scene it was crawling with fuzz, when they asked the pigs what had happened, they said, “looks like some disgruntled child laborer got drunk off his keister, ate his own face and flipped his forklift “ass over teakettle” into the ravine."

“You think he ate his own face?” they inquired. “Yep, that’s what it looks like, we’ll know for sure when they do the autopsy”, he replied.

Finding that the body had already been taken to the coroner’s office, they raced on ahead of the rest of the group knowing that the answers were there. As they arrived, the medical examiner was just finishing up documentation of the contents of the baby’s stomach. When asked, the M.E. told them that there was definitely ingested human tissue in this baby. After performing DNA testing, it was clear that this was indeed the baby that had eaten Dr. Browns face. They now realized that Dr. Brown thought the carts of bodies were part of a criminal identification lineup, not a visage buffet. But they chose to let it slide because he was clearly in shock, so you couldn’t totally blame him for his confusion.

They asked the M.E. to make this new information go away, to which he replied, “Sure thing, anything for you Chuck,” which made Dr. Chuck feel pretty good about being a Rotary Club member. They took the face fragments back to the hospital and were able to use about 50% of Dr. Browns original face in the project. They couldn’t remove all of the parts of the baby face from Dr. Brown without severely limiting his chances of recovery, but they were able to use parts from a couple of other donors to create a real cohesive whole. The only problem was if Dr. Brown didn’t shave he would have 5 different colors of hair in his beard. Most people would just think this was a sign of his age. Since some touchy secrets may have been revealed, everyone involved was charged not to tell that Dr. Brown was not only the first adult to receive a baby face transplant, but he was also the first recipient of a community patchwork face.

Incidentally, the only article in the daily newspaper that was in any way related to these events was in the classified ads, it read as follows: LOST, unmarked industrial sized forklift, was used for drug and gun trafficking, REWARD! If found, please contact Lester Joseph Gillis VI.