Face Transplant From Donor To Recipient

 

First US face transplant patient leaves Cleveland hospital, can now smile, eat solid food

She suffered a traumatic injury several years ago, the details of which doctors also won't reveal. But it left the woman with no nose, no palate,no way to eat and breathe normally.

During the 22-hour procedure, 80 percent of the patient’s face was replaced with bone, muscles, nerves, skin, blood vessels and some teeth taken from a woman who had died hours earlier.

She can eat pizza.She can smell perfume.She is the nation's first face transplant patient, and on Thursday night, she went home from a Cleveland hospital. "I'm happy about myself," she told her doctors.

It was the fourth face transplant in the world. “I must tell you how happy she was when with both her hands she could go over her face and feel that she has a nose, feel that she has a jaw,” Siemionow said. “She wants just to go out and be invisible in the crowd.”

It’s an example of a medical advance “that gives patients their lives back,” Dr. John Canady, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said in a statement.