Feb 6, 2006 10:38 am US/Eastern
Face Transplant Woman Meets With Press
AMIENS, France (CBS) ―
The French mother who made medical history as the recipient of a partial face transplant gave the world its first look at the results on Monday.
"I now have a face like everyone else," Isabelle Dinoire said at her first news conference since the groundbreaking surgery in November.
The more she can smile and grimace, Dinoire said, the more she feels it really is her face, reports CBS News correspondent Elaine Cobbe (audio).
In speech that was heavily slurred, she explained how she was disfigured by a dog bite last year and thanked the family of the donor who gave her new lips, a chin and a nose.
Her severe injuries made speech, even eating, hugely difficult.
A circular scar was still visible where the face tissue was attached in the 15-hour operation on Nov. 27 in Amiens.
It was a remarkable and composed appearance by the woman, who underwent this extraordinary surgery a little more than two months ago, reports CBS News correspondent Richard Roth (video). And she began by apologizing, saying that she still found it difficult to express herself in public.
Dinoire appeared to still have great difficulty moving or even closing her mouth, which often hung open. But in terms of coloring, the match between her own skin and the graft was remarkable.
"I expect to resume a normal life ... I pay homage to the donor's family," she said. "My operation could help others to live again."
Dinoire suffered a tissue-rejection episode in December, her doctors reported last month, but is now doing well. However, they said she has resumed smoking, which besides being bad in general for health is especially a problem after surgery because it impairs circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.
She'll be on drugs for the rest of her life to prevent her body from rejecting the transplanted tissue, but the surgery is consider a technical success.
"There wasn't an eye or a camera that wasn't focused right on her when she took that first sip of water," reports Roth.
There are huge physical, psychological and emotional hurdles still ahead for Dinoire, made all the more difficult by the fact that there is such intense medical and public curiosity about her case. She will be telling her story in a book and a movie, according to her lawyer, and she says her hope is that it, like her life, has a happy ending.
(© 2006 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
