Facing the world with a new face: Dinoire’s first appearance since transplant

Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant, appeared before a roomful of reporters here ...

Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant, appeared before a roomful of reporters here today, speaking in a slurred voice about her ordeal and thanking the doctors and the donor who have given her a new nose, mouth and chin.

“Since the day of the operation, I have a face like everybody else,” said Dinoire, 38, seated on a dais with her doctors in an amphitheater of the hospital where the transplant was performed in November. Though her lower lip hangs pendulously, exposing her lower teeth, and her perpetually open mouth barely moves as she speaks, Dinoire said she had begun to feel her transplanted skin.

Dinoire’s press conference was meant to ease public curiosity about the transplant and to show the world that the innovative post-transplant treatment was working. Though Dinoire’s lower face barely moves and she speaks with difficulty—her “s” sounds coming out like “sh”—the thin scar surrounding the transplant was barely visible at a distance.

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Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who is in charge of her immunosuppressive treatment, said there is still a danger that Dinoire’s body will reject the transplant and that her medication had already been adjusted to suppress signs of rejection that appeared 18 days after the operation. But he said that he has asked the French health authorities for permission to carry out five similar operations in the future.

“We want to launch these new techniques to give hope to other people all over the world,” Dr. Dubernard said.

Dinoire described how she awoke to discover her horrible disfigurement after her black Labrador chewed off the lower part of her face while she was unconscious from taking sleeping pills in May last year in what many people contend was a suicide attempt.

“On May 27, after a very disturbing week and with lots of personal worries, I took drugs to forget,” Dinoire said, adding that she passed out and fell against a piece of furniture. “When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette and didn’t understand why it wouldn’t stay between my lips,” she said, her face slack and emotionless. “That’s when I saw the pool of blood and the dog.”

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Dinoire said she went to look at herself in a mirror and “couldn’t believe what I was seeing, it was too horrible”.

“Now, I just open my mouth and eat,” she told the reporters at the press conference, during which she occasionally smiled with her eyes, her peripheral facial muscles tugging her mouth into the hint of a smile.

Dinoire’s doctors said it would be months before they would know how much motor control she would develop in the transplanted part of her face.

Dinoire said that “being able to show emotions through my face” was the best thing about her transplant. She said it has been a long ordeal, but that “in the end, I never really suffered”. —NYT

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