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Face transplant for gun victim
Ed Harris6 May 2009
A woman left horribly disfigured when her husband shot her at close range showed off the results of her face transplant today.
Connie Culp had America's first face transplant five years after the shotgun blast left a hole in the middle of her face.
She had 30 operations to reconstruct her face and today Mrs Culp, 46, displayed the results of the 22-hour, $300,000 transplant carried out at a clinic in Cleveland, Ohio.
The mother of two can talk, smile, smell and taste food again. Her speech is still developing and her face is bloated, but doctors plan to cut away the drooping skin as her circulation improves and her nerves grow, animating her new muscles.
"I guess I'm the one you came to see today," she said at the clinic today. "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."
Mrs Culp's identity, and the fact that it was her husband Thomas who shot her, were not disclosed until today.
She was left clinging to life after the attack in 2004. The blast shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye, and hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face. She needed a tube in her windpipe to breathe and only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were left.
Plastic surgeon Dr Risal Djohan saw her injuries two months later. Mrs Culp said: "He told me he wasn't sure if he could fix me, but he'd try. Here I am, five years later. He did what he said - I got me my nose."
Doctors took parts of her ribs to make cheekbones, fashioned an upper jaw from one of her leg bones and grafted skin from her thighs.
On 10 December last year, Dr Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors to replace 80 per cent of her face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from a woman who had just died. Mrs Culp told her doctors she just wanted to blend back into society.
Reader views (2)
Now SHE is a hero, not an overpaid footballer.
- Jackie, Surrey, 06/05/2009 17:09
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Brave lady..well done the surgeons.
- Rosie, watford, 06/05/2009 14:23
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