Man, 26, Who Received Face of 47-Year-Old Donor, Reveals What He Heard During His 3-Month Coma (Exclusive)
In 2018, Joe DiMeo got in a car crash that left his body 80 percent burned. Two years later, he received a historic face and double hand transplant at age 22. His donor was 47 years old
Immediately after the accident, Joe was in a three-month coma. In a video for PEOPLE's new 'I Survived' series, he recalls feeling the pain of early burn treatment and having bad dreams while unconscious
After his transplant in 2020, Joe met his now-wife, Jessica. She first learned about Joe before they met, when she was studying to become a nurseIn 2018, Joe DiMeo was involved in a car accident that burned 80 percent of his body, changing the trajectory of his life in an instant. However, his resulting medical journey spanned years, beginning with the three months he spent in a coma.
Joe, now 26, explains all that led to his historic face and double hand transplant in 2020 in PEOPLE's "I Survived" YouTube series. Though he was unconscious in the immediate aftermath of the crash, the New Jersey resident does remember being able to hear people around him in the hospital. He can also recall the "bad dreams" that accompanied the pain of his earliest burn treatment.
"When they take you into the tank room — where they wash you off, take off all the bandages — that's not fun. You can feel the pain. So you're dreaming about pain," he says in the newly released video. 'They're not meaning to torture you, they're just taking off the bandages, but it still hurts.'
He was 18 years old at the time of the accident, which occurred early in the morning, just after Joe worked a night shift at his job. He fell asleep at the wheel of his Dodge Challenger and woke up months later in a burn unit.
People often ask Joe if he experienced an encounter with the afterlife, and he can describe a memory that resembles the concept.
"The only thing I experienced is me walking my dog. He passed away in 2012, 2013," he tells PEOPLE. "I was like, 'Oh, this is it. I'm assuming this is the afterlife, just me walking my dog down an endless hill.''
After a couple more weeks in the burn unit, he moved to a burn rehab facility. Then he returned to his parents' home, where he longed for a sense of independence. Speaking to PEOPLE in February 2025, he remembers feeling like a "20-year-old baby again."
"My mom did my laundry, cooked, cleaned, all that stuff, and I just laid on the couch with my dog," said Joe. "That just wasn't for me."
In 2019, he met NYU Langone's Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez, who deemed Joe a good candidate for a face and double hand transplant. They knew it was a risky operation from the start; it was unsuccessfully attempted on two previous patients.
"The first one passed away on the table, and the second one the hands failed," Joe explains in PEOPLE's "I Survived" segment. "But going into any surgery, you can die, so that didn't bother me at all."
According to a press release issued by NYU Langone, more than 140 medical personnel were involved in the surgery, which took 23 hours to complete. Both his hands and face came from a 47-year-old donor.
"It's not a perfect surgery, and I was making it a perfect surgery in the beginning. But then I realized, you know what, let me be real," Joe says, reflecting on his recovery.
Not long after his surgery, Joe met a woman who would later become his wife. Jessica DiMeo heard about him from one of her professors in nursing school, and she watched a documentary made about his transplant.
"I remember looking at the picture of him, before and after, and thinking, 'Dang, that sucks. He was a handsome guy.' But that's all I thought," she tells PEOPLE.
They connected on Instagram in 2021, when Joe sent Jessica an Instagram message. At first they were involved in a long-distance relationship, but they eventually found themselves in the same place and moved into a home in New Jersey together.
The couple — who eloped in Hawaii in December 2024 — regularly deal with judgment from others, especially as they've shared their story with millions of viewers on TikTok and Instagram. But Joe leads with an especially positive outlook, knowing that the worst part of his life led to the best.
"It sucks I got into the accident. I lost 80 percent of my skin, and I have someone else's face and hands on me," he tells PEOPLE in his video interview. "But then I also found my life partner, and if I wouldn't have had the accident, I'd probably still be a cocky 26-year-old. I would prefer not to be burned, but I like my life now, just because I have Jessica around."
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Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Stung by high prices, Americans make their own weight-loss drugs
By Robin Respaut and Maggie Fick SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -In what she calls the "wild west" of obesity medicines, Missouri-based Amy Spencer is a pioneer. Each week the mother of two injects herself with weight-loss drugs, two of which are in clinical trials and not yet approved for sale by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One comes mixed with tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Eli Lilly's Zepbound. Spencer, 50, is not part of any drug trial but mixes the cocktails herself, using tiny doses that she believes are safe. The total cost is about $50 monthly, as little as one-tenth of what she would expect to pay their makers for full treatment. The drugs – glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) weight-loss medicines – are manufactured and shipped from China, according to the packaging. She orders them through online vendors. Spencer belongs to a fast-growing group of Americans turning to what many call the "gray market" for obesity medicines, bringing cheap active ingredients from China often labeled as for research purposes, according to import data and social media postings. It's a trend that drugmakers Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy, say is dangerous as well as illicit. Reuters tracked online forums and interviewed seven people who said they bought obesity medicines through this market, including an attorney in Arizona who works for a state insurance agency, a retired nurse in Illinois and a Type 1 diabetic in Louisiana, who said the medicine helped cut her insulin intake by more than half. For more than a year there has been demand for cheap Chinese-made powders, exacerbated by limited health insurance coverage in the U.S. Buyers told Reuters the gray market received a boost from an FDA ruling last year that U.S. compounding pharmacies – outsourcing facilities that create drugs in shortage – must stop selling obesity medicines more cheaply than the companies that developed them. Shipments of such active ingredients from Chinese entities not registered with the FDA jumped by 44% in January from the previous month, according to research by the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a public health group focused on the safety of prescription drugs. It said its findings are likely an undercount, because unregistered vendors may not disclose that their parcels contain medicines. Packages valued at less than $800 that enter the U.S. under the de minimis rule are not included in the data. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to government estimates, but a survey by nonprofit health policy research organization KFF found only about 8% say they have taken medicine for weight loss. Most of the gray market buyers Reuters interviewed had told their medical providers they were taking GLP-1 medicines but not where or how they bought them. Insurance coverage for weight-loss drugs has recently increased, but typically only covers branded versions, according to consulting firm Mercer. Many Americans have paid out of pocket for cheaper compounded drugs. Interest in taking small doses of the drugs has also spurred the online marketplace, buyers said. Taking to platforms including Reddit and Telegram for guidance, buyers import small quantities, often described as research materials to sidestep regulatory scrutiny. They swap advice for navigating the market, exchanging information on vendors, shipping and dosage, and sometimes clubbing together to cover the cost of testing the powders. One forum is called StairwayToGray. It has more than 21,000 members on Telegram and recently was gaining nearly 1,000 members weekly. It did not respond to Reuters' inquiries, and blocked access to the forum after receiving them. It has a website where it says it does not facilitate group purchases. "This community is filling the gaps and being our own regulators, ensuring testing and access for everyone who needs it. Because you shouldn't have to choose between your health or your wallet," it says. Spencer stores her stocks in her fridge and makes them up in the kitchen – carefully measuring sterile water, rolling the vial between her fingers until the powder dissolves, and drawing the liquid into a syringe before injecting it into her thigh or belly. She has lost 24 pounds. "This is working so well for me. It's so easy. It's cheap," said Spencer, who assumes her health plan wouldn't cover the drugs. "I don't know what I would do without this medicine." "VERY DANGEROUS" In February, 38 U.S. state and territory attorney generals wrote the FDA seeking action against illegally sold weight-loss medicines, including "research purposes only" ingredients from China. "Much like with counterfeit versions, these active ingredients come from unregulated, undisclosed sources ... and pose risks of contamination and inclusion of foreign substances," they said. Shabbir Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, said unapproved drugs can have problems with sterility, purity and consistency. "It can be very dangerous. You're playing the role of your own doctor, pharmacist, and FDA inspector," he said. Of those interviewed, only Spencer reported any problems: She once got her math wrong and overdosed, resulting in several days of severe flu-like symptoms. Lilly said it had taken many steps to address patient safety risks posed by the proliferation of unsafe or untested tirzepatide. The company said it is filing lawsuits, educating consumers and working with social media companies to identify and remove posts that promote unsafe products, including those described as "research use only." "We will continue to take action to stop those who threaten patient safety and urgently call on regulators and law enforcement to do the same," a Lilly spokesperson told Reuters. Novo Nordisk also said it continues to take action against entities that violate laws and regulations and put patient safety at risk. America's Poison Control agency, which maintains the nation's poison data surveillance system and monitors GLP-1 exposures, said it could not reliably track cases involving unregulated "research chemical powders" because they are sold under various names and formulations. The FDA's goal is to stop illegal sales of pharmaceutical medicines at the border, said George Karavetsos, former director of the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations and co-author of the imports study. But understanding the true nature and intended use of small parcels arriving from China can be difficult, and the FDA rarely seeks charges against consumers for personal use, he said. The FDA said it urges consumers to buy from licensed pharmacies and "avoid products of unknown quality," adding it was actively protecting consumers by intercepting illegal products at ports, and warning companies that market unapproved weight-loss medicines, including those mislabeled as "for research purposes." Although the forums show suppliers purportedly in China, Reuters was not able to verify where the drugs originate. None of the vendors responded to requests for comment. A Reddit spokesperson said the site prohibits facilitating transactions involving drugs and it had shut down a group found to be doing this. Telegram said it removes "more than a million" instances of harmful content each day, but did not comment directly. MICRODOSE MISTAKE Spencer has polycystic ovary syndrome and for years struggled with weight gain and hypertension. She decided to try obesity medicines after seeing claims on social media that microdosing them could give fewer side effects, and bought semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, from a compounding pharmacy for about $200 per month. She started on one-fifth of the lowest dose. Within days, intermittent joint pain she often suffered had dissipated: "I didn't realize how badly I hurt until the pain was gone." The cost would reach about $500 a month if she bought the drug from Novo, which recently introduced one-off discounts. After a week, Spencer said, her blood pressure dropped so low she thought she might pass out, so she stopped taking hypertension medicine. Her pressure stabilized and she lost three pounds. She wanted to understand more about microdosing, and turned to the gray market last summer. On Reddit, users told how another Novo drug in development, called CagriSema, had helped reduce inflammation and hunger pangs better than semaglutide. CagriSema is Novo's next-generation obesity drug candidate, still in clinical trials so not available to the public. It combines semaglutide with another molecule, called cagrilintide, which intensifies the hormone-mimicking effects to regulate blood sugar and reduce hunger. Spencer was intrigued. She found a U.S. reseller saying they tested Chinese-made CagriSema through a third-party lab before selling it to Americans. On microdoses of CagriSema, Spencer could enjoy food in small quantities. "I could say 'yes' because I knew I was only going to eat four bites." In October, Spencer saw on Reddit that tirzepatide might also reduce inflammation. She placed a new order for vials that contained cagrilintide and tirzepatide combined, dubbed "cagri-tirz." Now each Monday, Spencer injects herself with tiny amounts of cagri-tirz. On Thursdays, she uses retatrutide, a new obesity medicine by Lilly, also in trials. As she was switching to cagri-tirz, Spencer made a dangerous mistake. She calculated her new dosage without realizing the concentration of cagrilintide in the combined vials was 10 times higher than she had taken previously. "I was an idiot. I didn't do my math. Or rather, I did the math for the tirzepatide but not for the cagri," she said. Almost immediately, she began vomiting. The reaction was so severe she had trouble moving. She forced herself to drink water but couldn't eat. After four days, when symptoms lifted, she had lost seven pounds. Despite the blunder, Spencer didn't consider returning to compounded versions of the drugs or abandoning them altogether. She is not regularly monitored by a healthcare provider, but says her treatment has led to a "life-changing" reduction in weight, joint pain and blood pressure. "HONOR SYSTEM" Gray-market buyer Marie, 41, shows how do-it-yourself drugmakers are organizing. She describes herself as a "soccer mom" from the Midwest and asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her privacy. Last year she bought a compounding pharmacy's version of tirzepatide, paying about $470 monthly, and had lost more than 20 pounds when the FDA announced the ban on compounded weight-loss drugs. She began to worry about her supply. Browsing on Reddit, she discovered links to Telegram and a trove of detailed instructions from experienced users for buying weight-loss drug ingredients from China. Customers said they often paid with Bitcoin or through mobile payment service Venmo. After a month closely following the forums, Marie made a purchase in January. The package that arrived contained 20 small glass vials of white powder with red caps. There were no instructions. The vendor who advertised the package on Telegram said it came from China. Marie returned to the forums and joined a group of 52 other customers who paid a total of $1,020 to a Tennessee-based company called Peptide Test. Six members mailed in a vial each and the others chipped in their share of the fee. The lab found the samples were pure. Peptide Test declined to comment. "It's an honor system," said Marie. "These groups are very supportive in a way I haven't seen on the internet before." Before her first injection, Marie gave her husband details of what she had done. They agreed that if needed, he would disclose everything to the emergency medics. But she was fine. In March, Marie volunteered to organize testing a new order of tirzepatide. 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Why a Tinted Sunscreen Might Actually Be Better Than Your Average SPF
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New York Times
34 minutes ago
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An MLB manager found value in long walks. Research suggests it's a ‘brain-changing power'
For most of his adult life, Bruce Bochy has been a walker. Long strolls, short saunters, usually along water. When he managed the San Francisco Giants to three World Series championships, he often wandered the city's steep hills with his wife, Kim. On the road, he kept a daily routine: An afternoon walk to the ballpark, no music, no podcasts, just his thoughts. Advertisement 'Sometimes we get caught up in the game,' Bochy said. 'We let that define us. That's a very important part of our life, but I don't want that just to be my sense of significance. It's family and health. So that's part of my way of trying to stay healthy. Not just physically, but on the mental side.' Bochy, 70, isn't as nimble as he once was. He possesses two new hips and an artificial knee. In his third year with the Texas Rangers, he walks slowly, a hitch in his deliberate gait. But he still believes in the power of a good walk — an hour of exercise, fresh air and contemplation, a peaceful break to mull lineup decisions, brainstorm tactics and ideas and think through tough conversations with his players. 'I felt like I did something,' Bochy said. When it comes to walking, Bochy is one of sports' biggest enthusiasts; he even wrote a whole book about walks. But he's hardly alone. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was famed for his walking meetings. Ernest Hemingway was said to walk around the Seine in Paris to solve writer's block. And the famed psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky sharpened their biggest ideas while on long, meandering walks. 'I did the best thinking of my life on leisurely walks with Amos,' Kahneman wrote in the 2011 book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' In a world of Fitbits, iPhone health apps and other tracking devices, it might seem that walking's benefits are properly appreciated and understood. But Shane O'Mara, an Irish neuroscientist and writer, maintains that walking is a 'brain-changing power' which remains overlooked. At the very least, O'Mara is something of a walking evangelist. Whether you're an MLB manager, an executive, an elite athlete or anyone else, it can meaningfully improve your life. And if walking leads to more creativity and clearer thoughts, O'Mara pushes forward the following idea: Maybe it's something we should all be thinking about more. Bochy's walking habit has a familiar origin story. It started when his family got a dog, a black lab named Jessie. Bochy was managing the San Diego Padres and the task of walking the dog fell to him. Soon enough, he came to love the walks around nearby Poway, Calif., as much as he loved the dog. (And he really loved the dog.) Advertisement When Bochy joined the Giants in 2007, the ritualistic walks came with him. The benefits were consistent. One summer night in Milwaukee, after a brutal collapse against the Brewers, Bochy found himself sitting alone in his office, ruminating over the loss. Finally, he thought: I'm gonna walk home. It was maybe four miles, and it was late, and the Brewers' stadium is not exactly pedestrian-friendly. But when Bochy reached the team hotel, he felt better. Bochy kept up the routine as the Giants made World Series runs in 2010 and 2012, exploring cities and taking in San Francisco's neighborhoods. As it happened, those championship seasons came just as another Bay Area resident started thinking deeply about the value of walking. Marily Oppezzo was a dietitian and health researcher at Stanford in nearby Palo Alto, working on her PhD in educational psychology. Her doctoral adviser, Daniel Schwartz, was a believer in the 'walking meeting,' opting for discussions during strolls around campus. Oppezzo was interested in finding ways to integrate more exercise into the workplace. One day, during a conversation about her dissertation topic, Oppezzo asked Schwartz a question: 'Why do we do walking meetings?' Schwartz said they helped him think through new ideas. Oppezzo thought for a moment. Had anyone ever tested that? The question planted the seed for the first set of studies to measure if walking produces more creativity. In a series of experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked 176 college students to complete different creative-thinking tasks while sitting, walking on a treadmill, walking outside through campus or being pushed in a wheelchair. In one example, the students had to come up with atypical uses for random objects, like a tire or a brick, a common marker of creativity. On average, the students' creative output increased by 60 percent when they were walking. Advertisement What made the results even more interesting was that it wasn't just about the environment surrounding the students. For years, writers and thinkers had theorized that the benefits of a walk stemmed from the stimuli we experience in nature — the changing views, the fresh air, the green space. But Oppezzo found something different. Yes, people saw an increase in creativity when being pushed through campus in a wheelchair. But people saw an even bigger increase when walking indoors on a treadmill. 'Walking beat it,' Oppezzo said. 'There was something about pushing through the space.' There were limits, though. While walking was ideal for divergent thinking — idea generation, daydreaming, making narrative connections — it was mostly useless when it came to convergent thinking, or the kind of focused thinking one needs for quick math in your head. It was an idea that Kahneman described in 'Thinking, Fast and Slow.' The next time you're on a walk with a friend, he wrote, ask them to do 23 x 78 in their head. They will almost surely stop walking. Oppezzo found the same in one unpublished study. The participants could not do quick math. 'People were just garbage at it,' she said. When Oppezzo and Schwartz's research was originally published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition in 2014, it inspired a short cycle of media attention. Oppezzo eventually gave a TED Talk. But there was also a second response. 'Everyone was like: 'Oh, we already knew this,' ' Oppezzo said. Scientists, though, were still trying to understand why. One day earlier this year, not long after speaking to Bochy, I went for a morning walk. The conversation with Bochy had sparked an idea for a story, but as I walked and listened to music, sipping from a cup of coffee, my mind began to wander, and a familiar process took root. A series of ideas began to collide, and a mental mapping process began, constructing the scaffolding for a basic story structure in my head. Advertisement As a writer, it's hard to describe how or why this happens. One of my friends, a fellow writer and walking enthusiast, once told me he thought of this experience as 'inactive work.' O'Mara, the Irish neuroscientist, says that 'walking is, paradoxically, a form of active idleness.' You are not focused on unlocking an idea; it just happens. Neuroscientists describe being in this mind-wandering state as part of the default mode network, one of the brain's primary networks. It's active when we reflect on our pasts or imagine our futures. It helps us conceive narrative and make sense of the world. A second major network is the executive control network, which is active when we are using more focused thinking and problem solving. We use this network when we are solving a math problem or searching for one correct answer. 'The ability to think creatively seems to be the combination of these two systems working together,' said Roger Beaty, the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. 'So it's not just super spontaneous, random thinking, or all focused, logical thinking. But the synchrony of those two systems.' According to O'Mara, there are reasons that walking enables this toggling between mental states. Mild exercise can increase blood flow, boost our mood and enhance alertness. And bodily movement itself drives activity all over the brain. 'This activity allows ideas just below the level of consciousness to come into consciousness,' O'Mara said. But in most cases, walking is not the kind of exercise that can spike our heart rate. Nor are we overwhelmed by stimuli. There is a reason, after all, that we rarely daydream while sprinting or amid an intense basketball game. It's also why our minds don't wander as much if we walk while listening to a podcast or an audiobook. Advertisement O'Mara described the dynamic in his 2019 book, 'In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration.' The part of the brain that is active when we are walking, jogging or moving is the extended hippocampal formation, which is also the section that is active when we access memories. 'Mind-wandering allows the collision of ideas, while mind-focusing allows you to test whether it is nonsensical or interesting and new,' O'Mara wrote. 'The more we look, the more we find that the hippocampus plays a central role in both these activities.' Put another way: There are other possible inputs — or ways — to generate ideas. But walking acts as a useful catalyst. 'It is a simple hack,' O'Mara said. Scientists have continued to examine the relationship. In 2023, a creativity researcher at the University of Graz in Austria led a study that reinforced the findings from Stanford. Using sensors to track movement and mobile phone prompts to test a group of college students, the group was able to take research out of the lab and into a real-world environment. The group found that, on average, people who were more physically active had more creative ideas. In addition, a person's number of steps five minutes before doing a creative task was associated with an increase in the originality of their verbal ideas. 'If a person was walking more,' said Christian Rominger, the creativity researcher and lead author on the study, 'they were more creative.' In his prime, Bochy usually cruised past 10,000 steps per day. The number has become a benchmark for millions around the world. The origins were more marketing than science. The target dates back to the 1960s in Japan, according to I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard who has researched step counts. After Tokyo hosted the Olympics in 1964, a company in Japan produced a pedometer device called a Manpo-kei, which translates to '10,000 steps meter.' Advertisement It was a nice round number — roughly equal to 5 miles — but research has shown that a better target may be 7,500 steps. O'Mara offers another guideline: 5,000 more steps than you're doing now. As the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, 'Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.' For those who do it daily, walking is more than exercise. It is a time machine to the past, a window to our possible futures, a tool to sharpen our thoughts and ideas, our hopes and desires. For Bochy, it has always been a time to decompress. When he managed the Giants, he lived in a condo not far from the ballpark. His walk to work was short, less than 10 minutes. After games, win or lose, he would head into the night and walk home. (Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Mitchell Layton, Brace Hemmelgarn/Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)
