First US face-transplant patient reveals herself

Five years ago, a shotgun blast left a ghastly hole where the middle of her face had been. Five months ago, she received a new face from a dead woman.

Connie Culp stepped forward yesterday to show off the results of the nation's first face transplant, and her new look was a far cry from the puckered, noseless sight that made children run away in horror.



Culp's expressions are still a bit wooden, but she can talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Her speech is at times a little tough to understand. Her face is bloated and squarish, and her skin droops in big folds that doctors plan to pare away as her circulation improves and her nerves grow, animating her new muscles.

But Culp, a 46-year-old from Unionport, Ohio, had nothing but praise for those who made her new face possible.



"I guess I'm the one you came to see today," she 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."

The clinic expects to absorb the cost of the transplant because it was experimental, doctors said. Siemionow estimated it to be $250,000 to $300,000. That is relatively inexpensive, considering that other surgeons estimate it costs them $1 million to treat severely disfigured people with dozens of separate operations.