The 38-year-old French woman who underwent the world's first partial face transplant late last year is still not living a completely normal life, but she is recovering and has been able to take a summer holiday, one of her surgeons said yesterday.
Dr Benoit Lengelé told the annual meeting of the European Academy of Facial Plastic Surgery in Dublin that Isabelle Dinoire was able to eat and drink just days after her operation, something she hadn't been able to do for more than six months prior to her transplant as a result of having been mauled by a dog.
She lost her nose, lips and chin in the attack in May 2005.
"After three months she was feeling her face completely and saying this is now my face because I am feeling my face as my own," he added.
Dr Lengelé, who is professor and head of the department of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of Louvain in Brussels, explained, using slides and video footage, how the operation was performed and how even the face of the donor, a brain-dead woman, had to be reconstructed before her body was handed over to her family for her funeral.
Asked if the woman who received the transplant was now living a normal life, he said: "She went on holiday but she is not completely living a normal life because she must come regularly to the hospital for blood tests."
He explained this was because she was on immunosuppressants and they had to be monitored.
She must take pills every day, he said.
The transplant was performed at the Amiens hospital in northeast France last November and Dr Lengelé confirmed the transplant team had now sought authorisation from the French authorities to carry out five more transplants.
However, he stressed the patients for these would be carefully chosen.
"We are not running after the patients. We don't have any site on the internet to try to get patients. That's completely different from other teams.
"We simply research patients and if we feel that a face transplant for this patient is the adequate solution then we will proceed as we have done with this one," he said.
"We have opened the door. Many teams probably in the world are able to perform such kind of procedure.
"You know that in China another partial face transplant has been performed. People are preparing to perform a full face transplant in England . . . they plan to perform something like a full resurfacing of the face . . . this is not the same as we did.
"We did a functional reconstruction of the facial triangle, it's quite different. That doesn't mean that we are not planning to perform a full face transplant if we have an indication, but we are not running after indications," he added.
He said more patients were now inquiring about face transplantation.
"But many patients who are coming are no good indication for it. People are dreaming about being beautiful.
"So this is absolutely not a technique to become beautiful. There are many, many other solutions in facial plastic surgery to solve a problem of the nose or a face or lips and so on.
"This is a technique that is indicated for badly disfigured patients . . . We have to choose now very cautiously our patients because usually wrong results in surgery are coming from wrong indications," he said.
He said it was very emotional being part of the team which witnessed for the first time "a dead face regain life on the facial skeleton of another patient".
The "most brave person of all this adventure was the patient", he added.
Ms Dinoire spoke publicly about her operation for the first time last February and said she was thankful to have the opportunity for a new start in life. "I want to resume a normal life," she said.