Face transplant woman's first words were 'thank you'

THE first post-surgery words of a woman who underwent the world's first partial face transplant were "thank you", and she has since been able to eat strawberries and chocolate, her doctors said yesterday.

Surgeon Bernard Devauchelle said the patient regained consciousness 24 hours after the groundbreaking operation on Sunday.

"There were no post-surgical problems," he said at doctors' first news conference on the French transplant that has set off a debate among scientists over ethics but also won praise as a potentially pioneering, if risky, procedure.

"The patient was awake at the 24th hour and, putting her finger on the tracheotomy tube, her first word was 'merci",' Dr Devauchelle said. Behind him were projected images of the facial portions that were transplanted - a section of the nose, lips and chin.

The 38-year-old woman, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters whose name has not been disclosed, was mauled by a labrador in May, leaving her with severe injuries that her doctors said made it difficult for her to speak and eat. The dog was put down.

Since the surgery, the woman has eaten strawberries and chocolate and drunk coffee and fruit juice, her doctors said.

The donor was a brain dead woman. The entire procedure took 15 hours.

Video footage released by the hospital showed the light brown-haired woman, filmed from the back, sitting in a chair with a bundle of red knitting and needles on her lap while a doctor examined her injured face. The footage also showed her being wheeled out of surgery on a bed, her new lips, chin and nose in place.

Leading transplant surgeon Jean-Michel Dubernard acknowledged that he had initial reservations about the procedure.

But he added that when he saw the extent of the woman's disfigurement, said: "I no longer hesitated for a second."

He denied a French media report that the woman was attacked by the dog after she had passed out from having taken pills in a suicide attempt. Instead, he said the woman had taken a pill to try to sleep after a family argument and was bitten by the dog during the night.

"There was no suicide," Dr Dubernard said. The woman was examined by several psychiatrists in the lead-up to the surgery and "all these teams gave the green light".

He added that the woman was doing well yesterday.

Devauchelle said that in terms of matching the skin colour and texture of the donor and recipient, the results of the surgery "surpassed our hopes".

Dr Dubernard led teams that performed a hand transplant in 1998 and the world's first double forearm transplant in January 2000.

The hand transplant recipient later had it amputated. Doctors said the man failed to take the required drugs and his body rejected the limb.

Recalling his initial reservations about the transplant, Dr Dubernard said: "I lived through the story of a hand transplant, I know what is going to happen. We are going to be massacred by certain media."

He said the drugs given to prevent the body from rejecting the donated facial parts carry "a slightly more elevated risk of cancer".