After Receiving Face of 47-Year-Old Donor During Transplant, Man 22, Falls in Love with Nurse. How It Started with 1 DM (Exclusive)

• At 18 years old, Joe DiMeo was in a life-altering car crash that left him with burns on 80 percent of his body.
• In 2020, he became the first person to receive a face and double hand transplant during a 23-hour surgery.
• As he began posting about his journey online, Joe eventually found love through social media with his now-wife Jessica.

Editor’s Note: Warning that this article contains graphic images that may be disturbing to some readers.

Looking back, it was Joe DiMeo’s confidence that first captivated Jessica when they started dating. It’s in the way he walks, the way he dresses and his inviting conversation skills. Joe’s confidence shines through everything he does, says 34-year-old Jessica.

That’s still one of her favorite things about Joe, 26, and she imagines it’s just how he’s been his whole life, well before they started dating in April 2021 and tied the knot this past December.

“I mean, I didn’t know him before, but I could only assume that he was a very confident teenager and young man,” Jessica tells PEOPLE while sitting beside Joe at their home in New Jersey. “Now he’s a very confident man.”

His sense of self survived the accident that threatened his life, but other parts of his identity did not come out unscathed. Joe’s body was 80 percent burned after his car went up in flames, leaving practically no skin left to graft. In 2020, he became the first surviving recipient of a face and double hand transplant.

Joe’s world changed in drastically 2018, when he was 18 years old. He was driving home at 7 a.m., just after finishing the night shift at a lab where he tested food products. He didn’t mind working so late; he was putting the extra cash toward vehicle parts to fix up his Dodge Challenger.

Plus, Joe admits to PEOPLE, he didn’t really care about sleep back then — four or five hours felt normal. He was only 10 minutes away from his apartment when he crashed.

“I just fell asleep at the wheel, and the car hit the side of the road, hit a curb and caught on fire,” Joe remembers. He was in a coma for three and a half months and awoke in a burn unit, where he remained for two more weeks. He left the hospital to spend a couple of months at a burn rehab, then he moved back into his parents’ home.

“I was basically a 20-year-old baby again, which isn’t cool. My mom did my laundry, cooked, cleaned, all that stuff, and I just laid on the couch with my dog,” says Joe. “That just wasn’t for me.”

Though risky, the transplant was Joe’s only chance to regain independence. In 2019, he met Dr. Eduardo D. Rodriguez, who deemed Joe a good candidate for the operation. Ahead of the procedure, he underwent about six months of testing led by Dr. Rodriguez and his team at NYU Langone, though when COVID-19 hit, the transplant was postponed until August 2020.

According to a press release issued by the hospital, more than 140 medical personnel were involved in the surgery, which took 23 hours to complete. As Jessica later shared on TikTok, Joe was given both the face and hands of a 47-year-old donor.

He began his recovery with almost 14 weeks at NYU Langone under the care of his physicians. He tells PEOPLE that those days were filled with nerve pain, occupational therapy and hand workouts through the pain. He also had to relearn basic motor skills, like walking and jumping.

The history-making operation earned Joe some notoriety, and he started sharing his life online. He regularly posts videos about the double transplant, documents his progress and answers viewers’ questions. Joe has over 240,000 followers between TikTok and Instagram, but love proved to be the most valuable gift he got from social media.

He first connected with Jessica nearly four years ago, when he sent her an Instagram message about her Boston Terrier. She’d recently seen a documentary about his operation, and at the time, she was working with transplant patients in her work as a registered nurse. (She clarifies that she was never Joe’s nurse.)

For the first six months, it was a long-distance relationship: Jessica was living in Cleveland and Joe was in New Jersey, but their connection remained. They talked on the phone all the time, and Jessica drove some states over to visit. As she once shared on her own TikTok account, Joe once flew out to help Jessica move the day he was discharged from a hospital stay.

Eventually, they found themselves in the same place, and they moved into a home in New Jersey together. In many ways, their lives look pretty similar to any other couple around their age. Jessica commutes to New York City for her 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. shift as a nurse, and Joe — who is “a really good cook,” says his wife — usually makes dinner for them to eat when she gets back later that night.

There are less typical aspects of their routine, as expected. They like to eat at home, but Jessica notes how things that might take her 10 minutes to do — like cutting onions and tomatoes, for example — could take Joe about an hour to finish.

“He’ll pick me up from work and drop me off at the train station. He’ll take my car in to get repairs because I don’t want to do that,” she shares. “I’ll cut the vegetables in the morning, and then he makes dinner at night with what he can do.”

She adds, “His activities of daily living might be a little bit different than mine and yours, but we’re pretty normal.”

Yet there are “normal” parts of Joe’s former life that he’s had to live without. He can’t work on cars anymore. He can’t really do too much physical work with his hands, especially not outdoors, as he’s particularly sensitive to extreme weather.

While Jessica is at work, Joe is able to pursue passions both born of his injury and revisited after the accident limited his hobbies. He’s currently in the process of writing a book, and he also runs his own clothing brand called 80 Percent Gone.

He always liked fashion, and at the end of high school, he thought about going somewhere like NYU to pursue design. But that was an expensive future, so he gave up on the dream and went to work instead. Life after the transplant has offered him the time, space and platform to give fashion another chance. He now sells his designs printed on clothes and accessories as an online retailer.

Joe and Jessica continued building an audience online with their individual content and their love story, which has warmed the hearts of millions of viewers. Jessica says she encouraged Joe to keep posting because of his rarity and, conversely, because of all that he represents.

“There’s other face transplant recipients out there, but none of them are as active as Joe. Joe’s one of the younger ones, and he’s one of the lucky ones that doesn’t have brain damage issues either because a lot of the face transplant recipients do have some mental disability as well,” she explains to PEOPLE. “So I was like, ‘You have the perfect personality, the perfect story.'”

His dream is to be a motivational speaker, so he was keen to put his experiences out there in the interest of helping others. Their inboxes are flooded with messages that reaffirm that Joe is on the right track, and though the couple can’t respond to everything, their collective power inspires him to keep going.

Sometimes Jessica gets messages from parents who hope their children with disabilities will find a romantic partner one day. “There’s a lot of different aspects to it: Joe motivating people to continue [despite] their health issues,” she says. “Then on the flip side, us as a couple motivating people that might have a disability or look different that you can still find someone.”

Their public presence does enough good — promoting Joe’s business, spreading his message and inspiring others — to make negativity slightly more bearable. Jessica is getting better at handling the haters who bring unprovoked spite to their comments sections. Even when they’ve pushed her to her limits, she’s learned to “just block and delete” instead of fighting back.

“No matter what, if you respond, you’re the bad one. You’re the one that’s responding, so you’re getting defensive. It’s like a revolving door. It doesn’t stop sometimes,” says Jessica. However, she admits that while mean-spirited attention can hurt feelings, it often helps in other ways.

“Once I start seeing hate notifications, I’m like, ‘Oh, a video must be going viral, literally’ … One video on TikTok hit 120 million views,” she says. “There’s things that I do to prevent the hate, but obviously it comes through … When it’s older people too, I’m like, ‘Aren’t you way too old to be that mean?'”

Joe, for his part, remains entirely unbothered by his naysayers, if not a bit amused by them.

“I like it. I think it’s funny,” he says simply. “Because they’re not going to say it to your face. I’m also 6-foot-1, pretty wide shoulder-width, so no one’s going to say that to me in person. We’ve had no bad experiences in person.”

He continues, “I grew up in a different time where things were said a lot more on Xbox than they were on TikTok and Instagram nowadays. So these words don’t affect me at all, and I just laugh at them.”

Regardless of which interactions boost their content, viral fame has its more material perks too, like free engagement photos from a photographer who knew their content. Their celebrity status extends offline as well, though Jessica claims that she’s “never” recognized by people when she’s by herself. They were even approached by local fans when they traveled to Hawaii for their nuptials in December.

When the duo said their vows on the island of Oahu, they found themselves at the right place and at the right time. With Jessica’s relatives in California and Joe’s family in New Jersey, they chose Hawaii to avoid putting strain on their families.

“We wanted a sunset wedding so that the sun wasn’t too much on Joe,” Jessica adds. “It was really pretty. Like a nice breeze, [and] it’s just him and I.”