Connie Culp, a 46-year-old woman from Hopedale, Ohio, is the first full face transplant recipient in USA. Connie Culp was transplanted 80 per cent of the face donated from an unidentified dead woman after a long facial reconstruction surgery at Cleveland Clinic in 2008 December, becoming the person who received the most extensive face transplant performed so far.
Connie Culp is a victim of domestic violence. She was shot by husband Thomas Culp during an apparent suicide-murder attempt in 2004. Thomas’s point-blank shotgun shot blew away Connie’s nose, palate, upper jaw and lower eyelids, and caused her not able to eat solid food or breathe on her own. But after Cleveland Clinic’s estimated US$250,000 to $300,000 surgery led by Dr. Maria Siemionow, Ms. Connie has since made much progress.
Culp’s husband, Thomas, shot her in 2004, then turned the gun on himself. He went to prison for seven years. His wife was left clinging to life. The blast shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and an eye. Hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face. She needed a tube into her windpipe to breathe. Only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were left.
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She endured 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. She had countless skin grafts from her thighs. Still, she was left unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.
Then, on Dec. 10, in a 22-hour operation, 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 another woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive. [...]
In January, she was able to eat pizza, chicken and hamburgers for the first time in years. She loves to have cookies with a cup of coffee, Siemionow said.
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Culp left the hospital Feb. 5 and has returned for periodic follow-up care. She has suffered only one mild rejection episode that was controlled with a single dose of steroid medicines, her doctors said. She must take immune-suppressing drugs for the rest of her life, but her dosage has been greatly reduced and she needs only a few pills a day. [AP]
Connie made a public appearance on May 5 during a post-surgery press conference in Cleveland and thanked the donor’s family and the doctors who performed the surgery. Watch Connie Culp’s press conference video below.
