***Photo taken before time of burns.***
Jay Leno seems to have made a full recovery since his burn accident that happened last November, which left third-degree burns on his face, ear, neck, upper body, arm, and hand. Appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show, he showed off his “brand new face”.
“This is a brand new face,” he told Kelly. “It is. It’s unbelievable. What happened, I was working on a car and I got a face full of gasoline. And it caught fire.”
“I had been eating a Flaming Hot Dorito when I bit into it [and] it set my face on fire,” he joked.
In November, Leno had been working beneath the undercarriage of his 1907 White Model G steam car when he attempted to unclog a fuel line and the gasoline covered his face before igniting and catching fire.
He underwent 8 days of surgery, which included a surgical excision and grafting procedures on his face and ear. Kelly told him that it was even hard to tell that he had surgery done or any burns at all.
“No, no, you’d think there’d be a zipper here or something but no,” he quipped. “Only for the second time in my career am I the new face of comedy. I got it once in the 80s and now I get it again. This is a brand-new ear.”
Leno was treated at Grossman Burn Center in West Hills, CA by Dr. Peter Grossman. Dr. Grossman came with Leno on the show to discuss what it was like having to work on someone who’s face “everybody recognizes”.
“When I first saw Jay, I was a little uneasy,” Grossman confessed. “He was a little bit more significantly burned that I had hoped. Knowing that it’s Jay Leno — and a face that everybody recognizes — there’s a little bit of angst going on there.”
He also underwent “very aggressive” hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is a method of speeding up injured areas by increasing oxygen exposure to them.
“He’s done remarkable,” he added. “He’s a good healer.”
Two months after his burns, Leno suffered a motorcycle accident where he broke his collarbone, two ribs, and cracked his knee caps. He appears to have made a full recovery from his chaotic, accident-prone past few months.
Sources:
https://ew.com/tv/jay-leno-new-face-jokes-kelly-clarkson/
