00:00So I was 80% burnt.
00:02When I got the accident, I lost a lot of friends.
00:05Fake friends.
00:06I mean, I could do like a pity party, but that's just not me.
00:09I'm Joseph DeMeo. I'm 24 years old, and I'm from New Jersey.
00:13I'm the first successful face into the hand transplant in the world.
00:16When I was 18 years old, I moved out of my parents' house
00:19and got my own apartment for myself.
00:21I had my own car.
00:22It was a Dodge Challenger RT.
00:25I did a lot of mods to it.
00:26I don't remember the accident completely.
00:28I just went off what people told me.
00:29The year was 2018, July 13th, I think.
00:34So I went to work that night.
00:35It was overtime, so I wasn't supposed to be there,
00:37but I wanted extra money.
00:39Did the whole job, and then that morning,
00:42I just clocked out, was driving back home.
00:44I fell asleep at the wheel, and my car veered off the side of the road,
00:47hit a curb, flipped a couple times.
00:50I had long tube headers on the car, which is a mod
00:52to make it louder and stuff like that.
00:54So that scraped the curb, which created a spark,
00:57and the oil pan cracked at impact,
00:59and the sparks and oils just created a flame.
01:04So I was 80% burnt.
01:05I was in a coma for three and a half months.
01:08I guess my body went into shock,
01:10and they had to put me in a medically-induced coma
01:13so they could do all the skin graft surgeries.
01:16They had to amputate my fingertips,
01:18and then my lids were burnt, so they had to suture them.
01:22So I was looking out like a chain-link fence.
01:24When I woke up from the coma,
01:25the first thing I asked my mom, because she was there,
01:27I was the rims of my car.
01:29I knew there was an accident, but I didn't know the severity of it.
01:33The therapist came in, like occupational therapy and physical therapy,
01:36and she told me, yeah, your fingers have to be cut off
01:39and basically you can't move your fingers no more.
01:42And I was pretty sad about that.
01:44I can't work now with my burnt hands.
01:47She had this whole subject and talked about how we're going to get back to,
01:50you know, see if I can do stuff again, you know, just to help me do that.
01:54Yeah, so from that, it took about four months.
01:57After the hospital, I went to a rehab facility
02:01for more physical therapy to get back on my feet.
02:04And then I had to go to a plastic surgeon
02:07for the face and the hand transplant.
02:09So the donor was 48 years old.
02:11I actually had a stroke.
02:13After the surgery, I was like at a 0%.
02:15For the first couple weeks,
02:17I wasn't physically able to even move my fingers.
02:20They would have to move it for me.
02:22Now I'm at like a, I'd say 50%.
02:25I can cook, clean, do laundry.
02:28I can drive again. That was a big thing.
02:31When I got the accident, I lost a lot of friends, fake friends.
02:35It's sad at first, but then, like, you realize
02:38who your real friends are and you appreciate them more.
02:41So then all I had was my real friends, and they always supported me.
02:45People look at me, which don't bother me.
02:48I don't mind it, you know, because, like, I'm a curious person myself.
02:51Like, I don't mind people staring, because I would stare too.
02:54I created my TikTok about a year ago
02:57just to show my experience and my life journey.
03:01I was just doing it just to do it,
03:03and then, like, someone DMed me about it,
03:05saying, oh, like, you know, you stopped me from committing suicide.
03:08I think that suicide one really, like, pushed me to do more about it.
03:12A couple burn people hit me up about how do I do it.
03:16I just tell them just keep acting how you always acted.
03:19I mean, I could do, like, a pity part, but that's just not me.
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