US First Face Transplant Patient Connie Culp (Pictures/Video)

The first U.S. face transplant patient pictures have been released. Connie Culp, left disfigured from a shotgun blast, received a face transplant five months ago. See Connie Culp’s pictures and read more about her story below.

Five years ago, a shotgun blast left a big hole where Connie Culp’s face had been. But Culp received a new face from a dead woman five months ago.

Connie Culp came forward on Tuesday to show the results of the nation’s first face transplant.

Culp can now talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Her speech is still a bit hard to understand and her face is bloated and square-shaped, but doctors plan to work on that as her circulation improves and nerves grow.

Culp is very happy with her face transplant saying:

“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.”

Connie Culp’s husband, Thomas, shot her in 2004, then turned the gun on himself.  Thomas was sent to prision for seven years. The shotgun blast blew away her nose, cheeks, roof of her mouth, and one eye. There were hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters embedded in her face.

A plastic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Risal Djohan, got a look at her injuries two months later. “He told me he didn’t think, he wasn’t sure, if he could fix me, but he’d try,” Culp recalled.

Culp has gone through 30 operations to try to fix her face. Doctors took parts of her ribs to make cheekbones and fashioned an upper jaw from one of her leg bones. But even after all of this, Connie was unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.

But in December, Dr. Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who replaced 80 percent of Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from a  woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive.

“Here I am, five years later. He did what he said _ I got me my nose,” Culp said of Djohan, laughing.

There was no information on the donor or how she died, but family members were moved when they saw the before and after photos of Connie Culp.

Culp said she wants to help foster acceptance of those 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. “Don’t judge people who don’t look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might be all taken away.”

Connie has had a rough time with children thinking she was a monster.

Once while shopping, “she heard a little kid say, `You said there were no real monsters, mommy, and there’s one right there,’” Coffman said. Culp stopped and said, “I’m not a monster. I’m a person who was shot,” and pulled out her driver’s license to show the child what she used to look like, the psychiatrist said.

Culp is from the small town of Unionport, and has said she wants to blend back into society. Connie has a son and a daughter who live near her, and two preschooler grandsons.

Also at the Cleveland Clinic is Charla Nash of Stamford, Conn., who was attacked by a friend’s chimpanzee in February. She lost her hands, nose, lips and eyelids, and will be blind, doctors said. Clinic officials said it is premature to discuss the possibility of a face transplant for her.

In April, doctors at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston performed the nation’s second face transplant, on a man disfigured in a freak accident. It was the world’s seventh such operation. The first, in 2005, was performed in France on Isabelle Dinoire, a woman who had been mauled by her dog.

Click thumbnails for larger pictures

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Posted by: Monya

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