By Shawn Kennedy, AJN editor-in-chief—This weekend, I saw an article about Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman who was viciously attacked in February 2009 by a friend’s chimpanzee. (Click image at left for article and video at CNN.) She had suffered terrible injuries to her face and hands that left her without hands and eyes and severely disfigured. Last month, she received a face transplant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She also received hand transplants, but they failed to take and were removed because of sepsis.

It’s truly a tragic story. Christine Moffa, our clinical editor at the time, wrote a few blog posts about Charla back in 2009. She’d seen Charla’s brother Steve on the The Today Show, where he’d reported that the first thing his sister had said upon waking from her coma was the name of her nurse, Lisa. As she wrote in that first post, “Steve Nash attributed her response to the nurse to the fact that the nurses had always talked to [Charla] as if she were awake.” (Subsequent posts by Christine included photos of Charla that her brother had been kind enough to share.) […]