Son Survives Suicide Attempt, Mom Urges People To Help With Son’s Face Transplant

A Michigan woman wants people to help her son, who tried to take his life in 2014, in getting a face transplant following the traumatic incident.

Lisa Pfaff's son Derek, then 19, was on a spring break when he shot himself in the face outside his Harbor Beach home.

"I completely lost my mind. It's very heart-wrenching. I truly believed he was going to die that night," Lisa told People about the night that changed lives of her family.

Since then, Derek, now 26, has gone through 58 facial reconstructive surgeries. He is still on a feeding machine and has a tracheostomy to help him breathe, but he has mostly recovered from the incident. He recently qualified for a face transplant.

The procedure is considered an "experimental surgery," so Lisa's insurance has denied their request to cover the transplant and the anti-rejection medication.

The mother-of-five has now set up a GoFundMe page to help raise money for the procedure. "My heart hurts for him. As a mother, you want to fix it for your children, and there's nothing that I can do right now besides love and support him," she said.

Prior to the incident, Lisa said her son was the "all-American kid."

"He was an avid football player, he was an all-state running back... he had a passion for people. He's always been very giving and very caring about others," she said.

But Derek started to put "a lot of pressure on himself" in college while pursuing a degree in nursing. "He always [wanted to] be the best he could be. And the second semester of college came around. The classes were harder and I could see that he was putting more and more pressure on himself," said Lisa.

Recalling the night before the incident, Lisa said Derek, who had just returned home from a skiing trip, asked to have friends over.

Lisa said she went to check on Derek as her husband Jerry was leaving for work around 1.45 a.m. Then she noticed that he was not in his bedroom or the basement, but his keys and wallet were still on the counter. Jerry later found Derek "lying in a pile of red snow," according to the GoFundMe.

The teen was taken to Hurley Medical Center in Flint and later transferred to Henry Ford in Detroit, where he was put on life support and into a medically induced coma. By June of that year, Derek was allowed to go back home.

Today, Derek is doing fine, said his mom. "I do not worry about him having suicidal thoughts. I am 100 percent confident he would never do it again," Lisa said.

Derek's story was initially kept private by the family. "I've really shielded him and protected him from the world. He wasn't comfortable going out in public and I feel like I put this protective bubble around him. But 2021 came and he just said, 'This is the time,'" she said.

Meanwhile, Carson Molle, a survivor of a suicide attempt, wants people to know his story and prevent others from making the same mistake.

“I describe it as like falling into a black hole. It’s quick, unexpected, scary and dark...and it went to the point where I thought the only way I was going to get rid of those feelings was to try and take my own life,” said Molle, four years after he survived a suicide attempt, as reported by WBAY.

That’s how the 18-year-old, a Seymour High School student, was feeling when he shot himself in his head in the garage of his family home. He was 14 at the time.

Then he "kind of had a thought one night, what if me sharing my experience and the stuff that I have learned about mental illness, suicide could possibly save other people from attempting suicide themselves?”

So Molle, who underwent several surgeries and counseling, took help of TikTok to instill hope in others. He started sharing his story and "overnight it got hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of comments, and so I said maybe I have something here where I can really help people."