Six Surgical Miracles

After a 16-hour operation, Laurent Lantieri, head of plastic surgery at Henri-Mondor Hospital near Paris, reported that the surgical team had replaced "almost all" of Coler's face (lips, cheeks, nose and mouth), with that of a donor. Coler, who has recovered well, does not look like the anonymous donor because his underlying facial bone structure remains intact. This is the third face transplant ever done, and doctors at Henri-Mondor say it is the most extensive. (In 2005, a French woman received a partial transplant—new lips, a nose and a mouth—after the lower half of her face was mauled by a dog. In 2006, a Chinese man had a partial face transplant to repair damage done during a bear attack.)

6. Twice Born. Six months into her pregnancy, Keri McCartney and her husband, Chad McCartney, of Laredo, Texas, found out that their baby had an enormous and deadly tumor growing out of her tailbone. An ultrasound revealed the noncancerous, grapefruit-sized growth, which was draining the baby's blood supply and would have killed her. In a risky and rare procedure, surgeons at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston anesthetized McCartney to relax her womb, moved her uterus entirely outside her body, opened it, and then lifted about 80 percent of the baby's tiny body out, leaving just the head and upper torso inside. During the four-hour procedure, surgeons had to remove the tumor as quickly as possible, because too much exposure to air could have sent the baby into cardiac arrest. They then returned the fetus, which weighed about a quarter of a pound, to the womb and closed the amniotic sac, hoping to retain as much of the precious amniotic fluid as possible. The baby was born 'again' 10 weeks later, on May 3 of this year. Doctor's say she's perfectly healthy and her parents have named her Macie Hope McCartney.

Note: We did not include the many extraordinary operations performed to separate conjoined twins, but you can read about some of them here.

© 2008