WATCH: Firefighter With Face Transplant Breaks His Silence

A year after receiving one of the most detailed face transplants ever, Mississippi firefighter Pat Hardison is speaking out about how it changed his life.

“I was alive before but I wasn’t living before the transplant,” he told Inside Edition after a press conference in Manhattan.

In 2001, he was battling a house fire when the walls collapsed on him, leaving him badly burned.

He received the $1 million transplant from a donor name David Rodebaugh, who lost his life in a bike accident in 2015.