The first US face transplant patient has braved the glare of publicity to show what modern medicine can do.
Connie Culp’s new look was a far cry from the puckered, noseless sight that made children run away in horror five years ago after a shotgun blast took away the centre of her face..
Her expressions are still a bit wooden, but she can talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Her speech is at times a little tough to understand. Her face is bloated and squarish, and her skin droops in big folds that doctors plan to pare away as her circulation improves and her nerves grow, animating her new muscles.
She had nothing but praise for those who made her new face possible. “I guess I’m the one you came to see today,” the 46-year-old Ohio woman said at a news conference at the Cleveland Clinic, where the groundbreaking operation was performed. But “I think it’s more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person’s face”.
Until yesterday Mrs Culp’s identity and how she came to be disfigured were a secret.
Her husband, Thomas, shot her in 2004, then turned the gun on himself. He went to prison for seven years. The blast shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye. Hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face. She needed a tube into her windpipe to breathe. Only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were left.
She endured 30 operations. Doctors took parts of her ribs to make cheekbones and fashioned an upper jaw from one of her leg bones. She had countless skin grafts from her thighs. Still, she was left unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.
Then, on December 10th, in a 22-hour operation, Dr Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who replaced 80 per cent of Mrs Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, although the others were not as extensive.
“Here I am, five years later. He did what he said – I got me my nose,” Mrs Culp said , laughing.
In January, she was able to eat pizza, chicken and hamburgers for the first time in years.
No information has been released about the donor or how she died, but her family members were moved when they saw before-and-after pictures of Mrs Culp, Dr Siemionow said.