After Receiving Face of 47-Year-Old Donor During Transplant, Man 22, Falls in Love with Nurse. How It Started with 1 DM (Exclusive)

Looking back, Joe Dimea’s confidence was the first to fascinate Jessica when they started hanging out. This is the way he walks, the way he dresses and his interview skills. Joe’s confidence shines through everything he does, says 34-year-old Jessica.

It is still one of her favorite things about Joe, 26, and she imagines that he was his whole life, long before they started hanging out in April 2021 and tie the knot this December.

“I mean, I didn’t already know him, but I could only assume that he was a very confident teenager and a young man,” Jessica says as he sits next to Joe at their home in New Jersey. “Now he is a very confident man.”

His sense of himself survived the accident that threatened his life, but other parts of his identity did not come out intact. Joe’s body was 80 percent burned after his car entered flames, leaving virtually no skin to vaccinate. In 2020, he became the first survivor of the face and double hand transplantation.

Joe Dimeo before his accident; Joe Dimeo after his face transplanted in 2024.

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Joe’s world changed dramatically in 2018, when he was 18 years old. He was driving home at 7 am, just after he finished his night shift in the laboratory where he tested food products. He didn’t mind working so late; He put additional money according to parts of the vehicle to repair his Dodge Challenger.

In addition, Joe admits to people, he didn’t really care about sleep – four or five hours felt normal. He was only 10 minutes away from his apartment when he collapsed.

“I just fell asleep at the wheel, and the car hit the side of the road, hit the curb and caught fire,” Joe remembers. He was in a coma for three and a half months and woke up in a burns unit, where he stayed for another two weeks. He left the hospital to spend several months at rehab and then returned to his parents’ home.

“I was a 20-year-old baby again, which is wrong. My mom ruled, cooked, cleaned, all those things, and I just laid on the couch with my dog,” Joe says. “That just wasn’t for me.”

Although risky, the transplantation was the only Joe chance of returning independence. In 2019, he met Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez, who considered Joe a good candidate for surgery. On the eve of the procedure, it was subjected to about six months of testing led by Dr. Rodriguez and his team in Nyu Langone, although when he hit the Coid-19, the transplant was postponed by August 2020.

According to a press release issued by the hospital, more than 140 medical staff were involved in surgery, which lasted 23 hours. As Jessica later shared on Tictok, Joe got his face and hands of a 47-year-old donor.

Joe Dimeo after a car accident.

Joe Dimeo

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The recovery started with almost 14 weeks in Nyu Langone under the care of his doctors. He tells people that these days were filled with nervous pain, work therapy and manual exercises through pain. He also had to learn basic motor skills, such as walking and jumping.

The surgery of history production earned Joe a note and began to share his life online. He regularly posts videos on double transplantation, documented his progress and answers the viewers’ questions. Joe has over 240,000 followers between Tictok and Instagram, but Love proved to be the most valuable gift he received from social media.

He first connected with Jessica almost four years ago, when he sent her an Instagram message about her Boston terrier. She recently saw a documentary about his surgery, and she worked with patients with transplantation in her work as a registered nurse. (She explains that she was never Joe’s nurse.)

For the first six months it was a distance relationship: Jessica lived in Cleveland and Joe in New Jersey, but their relationship remained. They kept talking on the phone, and Jessica was driving a country to visit. When she shared in her tictal account once, Joe once flew out to help Jessica move on the day he was fired from a hospital stay.

In the end, they found themselves in the same place and moved together to a home in New Jersey. In many ways, their lives look pretty similar to any other married couple around their age. Jessica travels to New York City at 12 to 8pm as a nurse, and Joe – who is “really a good cook,” says his wife – usually their dinner is eating when they come back later that night.

There are fewer typical aspects of their routine, as expected. They like to eat at home, but Jessica notes that the things she might need – like cutting onions and tomatoes, for example, it takes about an hour to finish.

Joe and Jessica Dimeo.

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“He’ll pick me up from work and get me down to the train station. He’ll introduce my car to repair because I don’t want to do it,” she divides. “I’ll cut the vegetables in the morning and then at night dinner with what she can do.”

He adds: “His daily activities can be a little different from mine and yours, but we are pretty normal.”

Still, there are “normal” parts of Joe’s former life without which he had to live. Can no longer work on cars. He can’t really do too much physical work with his hands, especially not outdoors, because he is especially sensitive to extreme time.

While Jessica is at work, Joe is able to persecute passions born of injury and revised after the accident limited her hobbies. Currently, the book is written in the process of writing a book, and it also runs its own brand of clothing called 80 percent.

He always loved fashion, and at the end of high school he thought of going somewhere like NYU to deal with design. But it was an expensive future, so he gave up his dream and went to work instead. After transplantation, life offered him time, space and platform to give fashion another opportunity. He now sells his designs written on clothing and accessories as an online seller.

Joe and Jessica Dimeo.

Jessica and Joe Dimeo

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Joe and Jessica continued to build an audience online with their individual content and their love story, which warmed the hearts of millions of viewers. Jessica says she encouraged Joe to continue posting because of his rarity and, vice versa, because of everything he represents.

“There are other recipients of facial transplants, but none of them is as active as Joe. Joe is one of the younger ones, and he is one of the lucky ones who has no problem with brain damage, because many of the face transplants have mental disability,” explains to the people . “So, I was like,” You have the perfect personality, the perfect story. “”

His dream is to be a motivational speaker, so he wanted to put their experiences there in an interest in helping others. Their arrived post office is flooded with messages that confirm that Joe is on the right track, and although the couple cannot respond to everything, their collective power inspires him to move on.

Sometimes Jessica gets messages of a parent who hope their disabled children will one day find a romantic partner. “There are many different aspects: Joe motivates people to continue [despite] Their health problems, “she says.” Then, on the other hand, we, as a couple motivating people who could have a disability or look different that you can still find someone. ”

Their public presence does good enough – promoting Joe’s job, spreading his message and inspiring others – to make the negativity a little more tolerable. Jessica becomes better in handling haters who bring unprofessional spots to their comments sections. Even when they pushed her to her limits, she learned to “just block and delete” instead of returning.

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“No matter what, if you answer, you are bad. You are the one that reacts, so you become defensive. These are like a turning door. It doesn’t stop sometimes,” Jessica says. However, she admits that although malicious attention can hurt feelings, it often helps in other ways.

“Once I start seeing the announcements of hate, I am like,” Oh, the video must be viral, literally “… One video in Tiktor hit 120 million views,” she says. “There are things I do to prevent hatred, but obviously comes … when older people are, I’m like,” Are you not too old to mean that? ”

Joe, for his part, remains completely unlimited by his naysayers if he does not have fun.

“I like it. I think it’s funny,” he says simply. “Because they won’t tell you that on your face. I’m also a 6-none-1, a rather wide shoulder width, so no one will tell us personally. We didn’t have bad experiences in a person.”

He continues, “I grew up at different times in which things were said a lot more on Xbox than they were today on Tictok and Instagram. So these words do not affect me at all, and I just laugh at them.”

Jessica and Joe Dimeo.

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Regardless of what interactions increase their content, viral fame has more material advantages, such as free photographs engaging photographers who knew their content. Their celebrity status also extends off the net, although Jessica claims that people “never” recognized her when she is alone. Local fans even approached them when they traveled to Hawaii to their spouses in December.

When the duo told their vows on the island of Oah, they found themselves in the right place and in the right time. With Jessica’s relatives in California and Joe’s family in New Jersey, they chose Hawaii to avoid the burden of their families.

“We wanted a wedding to sunset so the sun was not too much on Joe,” Jessica adds. “It was really nice. As a beautiful breeze, [and] That’s just him and me. ”

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Source: HIS Education