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'She can swallow, eat'
18/01/2006 16:33 - (SA)
Marilynn Marchione
Lyon - "She can swallow and eat. That was impossible before the surgery. Psychologically, she's very happy," said Dr Jean-Michel Dubernard, a surgeon from Lyon, France.
Dubernard spoke in an interview before the start of a transplant surgery conference in Tucson where he was to make the first scientific presentation on the operation.
"For us, this experience is the best proof that we are right" to have done the transplant instead of trying routine reconstructive surgery, Dubernard said, referring to criticism of the operation.
However, his revelation of the rejection episode illustrates a danger the woman will live with the rest of her life, and the extraordinary risks in face transplants, which several United States surgeons also hope to offer soon.
The 38-year-old French woman received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor on November 27. She was severely disfigured last spring when her pet Labrador bit and scratched at her face while trying to wake her.
Huge demand
The lower two-thirds of her nose had been ripped away. Both lips were gone, leaving her teeth bared in a grotesque grimace. The holes where nostrils once were gaped open and ghastly.
Doctors did a series of computer animations to simulate the best they thought they could do for her with routine plastic surgery, but the results appeared so dismal they decided to attempt the transplant.
About three weeks after the operation, doctors noticed the transplanted skin turning red and suspected that she had an infection. But a biopsy showed the true culprit: her immune system actually was attacking and rejecting the new face.
On December 30, doctors resorted to giving her huge doses of the steroid drug, and finally succeeded in halting the rejection episode on Jan. 2.
"She was alarmed" at the prospect of losing her new face, but was relieved when it looked normal again after a few days, said Dr Emmanuel Morelon, another of her physicians.
Since then, the woman has done so well that she can go out in a crowd without drawing lots of attention, as she did on Sunday night with her psychiatrist, Dubernard said.
(Dr Benoit Lengele, another of her physicians from Brussels, Belgium, showed recent photographs of her with just a thin, ropelike red scar around the edges of the transplanted face.)
"I want to have this thing clear on this point," Dubernard said. "We are doctors. We did it to aid the patient, not to make beaucoup," he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together to mean money.
On Wednesday, the woman, identified only as Isabelle because of French privacy laws, plans to move back to Amiens, France, from Lyon, where she has been receiving care. She is divorced and has two teenage girls.
Since the French operation, dozens of hopeful patients have called the clinic.
- SAPA
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