'God wanted him to live': Michigan family raises money for son's face transplant after suicide attempt
Editor's note: This story includes graphic details that may not be suitable for all.
DETROIT – She’ll never forget the sound of her husband’s scream, even seven years later.
It was nearly 2 a.m. and Lisa and Jerry Pfaff couldn’t find her second-oldest son, Derek. They’d found his keys and wallet, but he was nowhere to be found inside their home in Harbor Beach, Mich., a small town near the tip of the "Thumb."
That was until Jerry found him just outside the house, lying in the snow, surrounded by blood and hardly breathing.
Derek attempted suicide on March 5, 2014, using a 10-gauge shotgun while home for spring break during his freshman year of college.
The attempt left Derek unrecognizable and now the Pfaff family is fundraising for Derek to receive a face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, one of six institutions in the nation to perform the procedure.
On that night in 2014, Jerry, barely registering what he was looking at, yelled for Lisa to stay inside and call an ambulance, attempting to shield her from the scene at his feet. Derek’s face was obscured from the cover of night and hard to make out.
“No, Derek, no!” Jerry screamed, his voice echoing through the small rural town. “Why, Derek, why?”
“I didn't really know what to do, to wait for the ambulance or get the neighbor to help me, but he is laying there and pretty much face all gone,” Jerry said, recalling the finest details of the snowy Wednesday morning that are now burned into his memory.
Lisa and Jerry had no reason to suspect this would ever happen to any of their children, let alone their 19-year-old son, who was a picture-perfect, all-American boy. Derek was a decorated high school athlete, an honors student with dreams of becoming a nurse, and a social butterfly — he wanted to be the best in every aspect of his life.
“Derek was putting some added pressure onto himself during the second semester,” after earning a perfect grade-point average his first semester at Grand Valley State University, his mother said. Derek wanted to make sure he maintained it.
“He was a perfectionist," she said. "He really was like that with everything. We never had to discipline him as a child, he always put more pressure on himself than we as parents ever had to.”
Despite constant reassurance from his parents that he didn’t have to excel, that it was more than fine to just pass a class instead of striving for the A, Derek wouldn’t have it. He wasn’t just a football player at Harbor Beach High School, he was an all-state running back and captain of the team; he didn’t just attend classes, he got straight A’s.
“He's wired a lot like I am, and so I was the same way and currently the same way,” Lisa said. “We just strive for excellence in everything that we do. He always did well, he was always a top performer, he was a great athlete.”
Operating in pure shock, Jerry pulled Derek into his truck’s back seat and drove to the Harbor Beach Community Hospital, about 3 miles from their home. As he braved the slippery roads, trying to drive as fast as he could, as carefully as possible, Jerry was left with his thoughts: “Why would somebody do this? What was he thinking? Life could never be this bad.”
“You can’t see it coming, and you never think it’s going to be one of your own, that's for sure,” said Jerry, who's a vendor for All Star Services, a Port Huron-based vending machine supplier located in eastern Michigan. “We're a tight-knit family, no problems, kids all get along good and no fighting. I never allowed that amongst themselves. And so you just never think it’d be one of your own.”
Still at home, Lisa called her father to ask him to bring their family priest, Father Bill Spencer, to meet them at the hospital to read Derek his last rites and final blessings.
“I truly believed he was going to die that night,” she said.
Knowing that a gunshot wound victim was en route, the team at the hospital steeled themselves and prepared to get to work. However, hearing that the ambulance was called off and that the father was transporting the victim, Dr. Kelly O’Sullivan figured the injury wasn’t too extensive.
“I met them at the door, and he had his head down so you couldn't see the injury, and I bent over to look at his face, because if a patient can talk to you and they're comfortable, that's a big deal,” O’Sullivan said. “There was nothing left. There were little shards of skin at the side of his face and that was it and that's when I knew, oh boy, this is serious, this is extreme.”
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O’Sullivan grabbed the wheelchair from Jerry and rushed Derek to the hospital’s trauma unit. By the time Derek was placed on a bed, he had stopped breathing.
“Normally, when someone stops breathing, initially, you put a mask on them and you do what's called bagging them where you force air into their lungs, and you can do that for some time,” she said, “but with Derek, there was nothing on which to make a seal. So, if you were going to breathe for him, it had to be through a tube.”
Aware that there was little leeway in intubation, O’Sullivan prayed for guidance.
“I prayed that if this young man was meant to live, that God would take my hands and make that tube go right where it should and resuscitate him, and if that was supposed to happen, that it would happen and it did.”
Armed with a small team and few resources, O’Sullivan knew Derek would need a surgeon and plastic surgery, so transportation to a bigger hospital would be needed. Due to poor conditions, a helicopter was unable to take Derek to Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Mich., and he'd instead be transported in an ambulance, a tricky, two-hour journey that traverses rural dirt roads and required a nurse volunteer to hold the tube.
At Hurley, Jerry and Lisa — now joined by two more of their children while the youngest two stayed home — said their last goodbyes to Derek as doctors told them that they should consider organ donation because of Derek’s youth and athleticism. Derek was then transported via helicopter to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit where his organs would be harvested.
However, doctors at Henry Ford had an entirely different conversation with Lisa and Jerry.
Doctors wanted to take Derek into surgery that night and for the next 30 days doctors worked around the clock. For weeks, Derek was in a medically induced coma.
“Derek being alive gave us the hope and the strength to help him persevere through this, seeing him lying there, it destroyed Jerry and I,” Lisa said. “I know how he's wired that he would be able to fight through this, he's a fighter. And that kept us going. And I think it gave us the strength to help him get through it.”
With time, Derek would show signs of improvement and move a hand or a foot occasionally. Exhausting her patience, Lisa at one point yelled at Derek, “Derek Michael, move that damn foot,” and he did. Doctors were excited that not only could Derek hear, but he could also respond.
“We just had that reassurance that God wanted him to live for a reason, and he was going to live for a reason, and we both truly believe that,” Lisa said. “(There was) a lot of praying while he was in surgery we would sit there and just pray. A lot of praying going on between my husband and I.”
Derek was weaned off of sedation, but doctors still figured he would end up in a rehabilitation center. But doctors didn’t know Lisa, who would become known to drop the hammer on doctors.
Lisa, who has a crippling fear of needles and blood and hospitals in general, learned to read Derek’s monitors and knew his medication schedule by heart and made sure it was followed to a T. She speaks of Derek’s surgeries using the vocabulary of a trained medical professional — or a mother who wants to make sure her son is getting the best treatment possible.
“I'm just wired that way and I only wanted the absolute best for him to get him in the right direction for his recovery, so I spent days and nights there,” said Lisa, who's a Walmart manager.
Derek walked through the doors of their Harbor Beach home using only the assistance of a cane on Mother’s Day weekend, about two months after the incident.
The 59th, and last, procedure
In seven years, Derek underwent 58 surgeries. His final surgery, he hopes, will be a face transplant at the Cleveland Clinic, where the now-26-year-old has been approved as a qualified candidate after hours of consultations and evaluations.
The Cleveland Clinic is one of six institutions in the nation to perform face transplants, a high-risk procedure that takes months of planning and upward of 10 hours to conduct. The risk comes in how the recipient's immune system responds to a new face, typically harvested from those who have passed.
A doctor from the Cleveland Clinic was not available to speak with the Free Press, which like Paste BN is a part of the Paste BN Network.
As of August 2018, 40 face transplants had been performed worldwide since 2005 to patients between the ages of 20 and 60, several of whom have died due to complications, according to the Mayo Clinic. Similar to all organ transplants, face transplant patients then have to remain on immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives to reduce the risk of their bodies rejecting the new face.
The Pfaff family was denied funding for the third time for the transplant by their insurance provider in January, leaving the family with few options to pay for the procedure. In March, Lisa turned to the platform that has raised millions for others who are similarly left in the dust by their insurance companies: GoFundMe.
A step toward normalcy
Since launching the fundraising campaign, Lisa has received correspondence from people across the nation who have experienced similar situations or have struggled with suicidal thoughts. Donation notes often include stories of a lost loved one, family giving on behalf of those they’ve lost or just people wanting Derek to stay hopeful.
The campaign has raised nearly $200,000 since the campaign was launched March 21.
“Derek’s purpose is shining through of what he's meant to do and how much better he'll actually be able to do it after he gets his face transplant,” said Lisa, who envisions him becoming a motivational speaker and visiting schools and organizations nationwide to inspire others and share his story.
“I could eat with my family, I could wear my glasses and see a lot more and overall my quality of life would be better,” Derek said, his speech slow and labored but comprehendible to a patient ear. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my faith, God let me live for a reason, so I wouldn’t be here without Him.”
A series of small miracles, or unexplainable coincidences, can be credited for Derek's survival. When Jerry placed him in the car, without much thought or reason he placed him facedown, which potentially saved him from choking on his blood; Derek was lying in snow after the incident, which inadvertently slowed his blood flow; the intubation was successful on the first try; the list goes on.
In addition to becoming a motivational speaker, Derek dreams of living a normal life with traditional milestones: getting married and becoming a father.
"I would be able to live a normal life."
Suicide warning signs
Signs of suicide include expressing hopelessness, threatening self-harm, increased alcohol and drug use, and withdrawing from others. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-TALK (8255) or suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
Follow Miriam Marini on Twitter: @miriammarini.