Courageous face-transplant patient challenges the world: Look at me

Published on Wednesday 6 May 2009 22:02

A WOMAN who lost her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and one eye when she was shot by her husband spoke yesterday about how a face transplant transformed her life.

Connie Culp, 46, was shot by her husband at close range in 2004. Only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were left intact.

On 10 December, she underwent a 22-hour operation, where a team of 11 doctors replaced 80 per cent of her face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died.

She was the fourth person in the world to undergo a face transplant and the first in the United States.

Yesterday, the Ohio mother-of-two paid tribute to the donor at the Cleveland Clinic where the ground-breaking surgery took place.

"I guess I'm the one you came to see today," she said. "I think it's more important you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person's face."

A plastic surgeon at the clinic, Dr Risal Djohan, studied her injuries two months after she was shot. "He told me he didn't think, he wasn't sure, if he could fix me, but he'd try," Mrs Culp said.

She underwent 30 operations to try to transform her face. Doctors used parts of her ribs to create cheekbones and shaped an upper jaw from one of her leg bones.

Mrs Culp had countless skin grafts from her thighs, but was still unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own or smell. In January, the transplant enabled her to eat pizza, chicken and hamburgers for the first time since she was shot.

"Here I am, five years later. He did what he said – I got me my nose," Mrs Culp said, laughing.

She added that she decided to go public because she wanted to help foster acceptance of people who have suffered burns and other disfiguring injuries.

"When somebody has a disfigurement and don't look as pretty as you do, don't judge them, because you never know what happened to them," she said. "Because you never know – one day it might be all taken away."

Dr Maria Siemionow, director of plastic surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, who oversaw the transplant, described it as the most complex procedure completed to date and said she believed it had "dramatically" changed Mrs Culp's life.

No information has been released about the donor's identity or how she died. However, Dr Siemionow said her family were "moved" when they were shown "before" and "after" pictures.

Mrs Culp was left fighting for her life after her husband, Thomas, with whom she ran a painting and contracting business, shot her then turned the gun on himself. He survived and was jailed for seven years.

Hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellets and bone splinters were embedded in her face.

Mrs Culp has now told her doctors she wants to "blend back" into society.

She still has to have some folds of skin pared away when her circulation has improved.

In 2005, Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old Frenchwoman, received a partial transplant of her lower face after her dogs mauled her lips, nose and chin.

Since then, two other transplants are known to have taken place – on a Chinese farmer, who had his face ripped off by a bear, and a 30-year-old Frenchman who was badly burned.