TFA focuses on what it feels like to live with someone else's face. I believe this part is the unthinkable. It might look logical after the fact, but would have been hard to anticipate. Like touching the inner part of your face with the tongue and finding the feeling "horrible".
Here a very partial selection that illustrates my point:
Isabelle felt less like a princess than a circus animal. After the transplant, she spoke of being tormented: “Everyone would say: Have you seen her? It’s her. It’s her And so I stopped going out completely.”
Living with a stranger’s face was as psychologically difficult as ethicists feared. Two years after the transplant she spoke to the strangeness of having “someone else’s” mouth. “It was odd to touch it with my tongue. It was soft. It was horrible.”
And then one day she found a new hair on her chin – “It was odd. I’d never had one. I thought, ‘It’s me that has given it life, but the hair is hers.’”
after each psychiatric appointment, she would come home “at the lowest, full of guilt and suicidal desires”. More than once, according to her, she attempted suicide after her transplant;
Isabelle never resumed a normal life, never returned to work or good mental health, and from 2013 experienced regular episodes of rejection.
She died in 2016
There are similar story of people who psychologically rejected their new hand after a transplant as "someone else's hand" is too hard of a burden, something they couldn't imagine.
A month ago when I visited a dentist, the anaesthesia was unusually strong and took away sensitivity on half of my face for few hours. Just touching my face was strange and strongly unpleasant despite causing no physical feeling. It felt it wasn't my face. Though I could have "thought" of the effect previously (as everyone I sometimes slept on my arm and woke up with no feelings on a limb) but the feeling of "my face but not my face" is something I hadn't, and possibly couldn't, anticipate.
Other psychological experiences cold be called like that. Grief is among that. You've seen people crying in movies and you believe you "understand". Oh boy, you don't. Even if given time to adapt to the idea that your loved relative is on the one-way slope and has only days or even hours remaining, the anticipation is nowhere close to actual suffering at the very second your relative is truly gone. It is an "unthinkable" experience.
