A man whose face was ripped off by a gunshot has revealed what he looks like after his life-changing face transplant surgery.
Andy Sandness, now 40, aimed a gun at the underside of his chin at the age of 21 and pulled the trigger two days before Christmas in 2006 amid a battle with depression.
The shot obliterated his mouth, nose, lips and much of his lower face, but the force caused his head to jerk backward – and the bullet to narrowly miss his brain.
Over four months in the hospital, the Wyoming native went through 14 initial surgeries to try to reconstruct his face, but due to the immense trauma, he was left with a mouth no wider than an inch and only one tooth, meaning he could barely eat, and had no sense of smell.
Facing constant stares in public, Sandness, an electrician, struggled with his appearance for the following decade until doctors at the Mayo Clinic offered him a face transplant – the first ever performed by the hospital.
In a grueling 56-hour procedure with nearly 30 doctors and nurses, a donor face was transplanted onto Sandness from below his eyebrows.
Now, following the 2016 transplant, Sandness has revealed how his new face transformed his life and led him to be able to marry and start a family.
‘One of the main reasons why I did it was to get a wife, have kids, and have my own family one day,’ he said in a new book, Face in the Mirror.
Before the procedure, Andy Sandness struggled with his appearance (pictured above in June 2016 just before he underwent the face transplant)
‘I never expected that to happen in my whole life,’ he said, later adding: ‘I don’t have to live in fear anymore. I can go out and be myself. I’m allowed to be myself again.’
Following the successful surgery – the 12th face transplant in the US – Sandness told the Daily Mail how he re-gained feeling in most of the face, and can now feel when people touch him and when it is hot or cold outside.
He is also able to move facial muscles for the first time in a decade, allowing him to smile, pucker his lips to kiss and furrow his nose and brow when he is mad. In fact, Sandness said he got about 70 to 75 percent of his movement back.
‘The thing that helps the most is I have my original eyes and my original eyebrows,’ he said, ‘so that stuff never changed, and that allows a lot of movement.’
After the surgery, he quickly re-adopted his extroverted personality, enjoying hockey games and meals at restaurants without people stopping and staring.
Then, in August 2017, he started dating Mayo Clinic nurse Kim, who he met at the hospital.
In May 2020, the pair married, and in October that same year, they welcomed their first child, a boy named Wyatt Lee. They later welcomed a daughter, Grace Catherine.
When asked whether he credited the facial transplant with helping to bring them together and start a family, Sandness said this was something the couple debated all the time.
‘My wife, she says 100 percent we would have gotten married without it,’ he said, ‘and that’s sort of how I met her, too. But for me, I’m not so sure.’
His plastic surgeon, Dr Samir Mardini, said: ‘We helped him become normal… When I see him, I can’t believe what he looks like. I look at the movements in his face and the emotions he expresses – they appear so natural and effortless.
‘I think about the miracle that these movements of a face that once belonged to someone else, and that person is no longer with us, but this face is living the life of another person.’
Sandness pictured January 2017, approximately six months after undergoing the surgery
Sandness is pictured above in a family photo with his wife Kim, son Wyatt Lee, daughter Grace Catherine, and the family dog
Speaking about the surgery on the Mayo Clinic’s podcast last month, he said: ‘To be able to get back to living a normal life! I was able to get married. I have two kids. I can go swimming, I can eat basically anything I want besides grapefruit [because it interferes with anti-rejection drugs].
‘I have a functioning face. When I smile, I can smile. Then the aesthetics part of it is a big part too, because when I go into the store, people are like, “Oh, you got in a car wreck?”‘
After Sandness was first brought to the Mayo Clinic in December 2006, he was sure that none of this would be possible.
While doctors were able to save his life, they were not able to save his face – leading him to deal with the fallout for years. People would stare at him at grocery stores, while children would ask what was wrong with him.
Aside from work, he became a recluse, spending most of his time in the hills hunting elk and fish. He had virtually no social life.
He was also plagued by his prosthetic nose, which would keep falling off and become discolored if he was in the sun too long. And his small mouth left him struggling to eat, forcing him to chop all of his food into minuscule pieces.
Over the next five years, Sandness continued to go to the hospital for corrective surgeries, but his appearance was still far from what he looked like before.
Despite the trouble, Sandness said that after the suicide attempt, he very much wanted to live.
Sandness (pictured in 2025) is now married and had two children, which he credits to his new face
Then, in May 2012, he got a call from Dr Mardini that would change the course of his life – it was to suggest the face transplant, but it would still be years until it came to fruition.
Sandness jumped at the chance and, after the Mayo Clinic’s face transplant program officially opened, he was put through a battery of tests to assess his mental health before being approved in January 2016.
In July that same year, he received a call saying they had found a potential match for him.
The hospital had been connected with the family of Caden ‘Rudy’ Ross, 21, with a similar skin tone who had declared he wanted to donate his organs in the event of his death.
Ross had died by suicide that same month, having shot himself. He was survived by his eight-month pregnant, 19-year-old wife who made the decision to allow the transplant.
A few days later, Sandness was taken into surgery.
The surgeons disconnected the nerves, tissue and muscle on the donor face before transplanting everything onto Sandness and connecting the new face to all of his vital nerves and blood vessels.
For three weeks after the surgery, he wasn’t allowed to see his new face – all mirrors and phones were taken away while doctors waited for the swelling to reduce.
When the new face was finally unveiled, Sandness wasn’t able to speak, but wrote down on a sheet of paper that it ‘far exceeded my expectations.’
Sandness pictured before his suicide attempt
He met Lilly Ross, the wife of the 21-year-old man from whom he received the new face
In November 2017, 16 months after the surgery, he met Lilly Ross, the wife of his donor.
She had been concerned he might look like her late husband, but said that, apart from a characteristic bald patch in the center of the beard, he didn’t look like him at all.
Ross said seeing the transplant ‘made me so proud’ because she was able to see how it had changed Sandness’ life.
Asked about the injury, he said: ‘The one thing that I will say is just that the effect it has had on my family given that, my mom, she had PTSD afterward.
‘And my brother, he said it was perfect after the transplant and that, “You don’t know how relieved we are that you can live a normal life.”
‘In that situation, you don’t care, but it is going to screw with your family. I mean, the cops don’t come in and clean that stuff up, you have to clean it up, you have to, it was really hard on my family.’
He added: ‘I’ll never forget going up to the Charlton building to meet with everybody. I hopped in the elevator and there’s a little kid in there.
‘Normally the kids would just clutch their mom and hide behind them. The little boy just looked at me and smiled and I just waved at him.
‘That’s when I knew that it was successful, that we’ve gotten most everything that we wanted.’
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