The first recipient of a face transplant, a thirty-eight-year-old French woman named Isabelle Dinoire, swallowed a mouthful of sleeping pills in May 2005 after an argument with her daughter. She didn’t expect to wake up again but did. Groggy, she put a cigarette in her mouth and found it wouldn’t stay. That’s when she noticed the pools of blood: her Labrador retriever had mauled her while she slept. Dinoire staggered to a mirror. Tousled, dirty-blond hair still ringed her face, but the dog had gnawed her nose down to two skeletal holes, and no lips covered her teeth or gums. Although emergency care stabilized her, in later months Dinoire became a recluse, hiding behind a surgical mask at all times.<\/p>\n
If something went wrong with a face transplant, amputation wasn’t an option. Nevertheless, French surgeons – who tempted fate by comparing themselves to Copernicus, Galileo,and Edmund Hillary – pushed ahead in 2005 with Isabelle Dinoire. They picked Dinoire partly because she’d lost “only” her nose, lips, and chin (the facial triangle), which made for an easier surgery. A suitable donor turned up in November 2005, when a forty-six-year-old woman in a nearby town tried to hang herself and ended up brain-dead. She matched Dinoire in age, blood type, and skin tone, and Dinoire’s surgeons rushed into action. They spent hours “recovering” the hanged woman’s face – peeling away her skin and connective tissue along with blood vessels and nerves, leaving only a red mask of muscle behind. The transfer onto Dinoire then took the better part of a day.<\/p>\n
During recovery, Dinoire’s new face swelled frightfully, and on day eighteen her body nearly rejected it. Meanwhile the media got pretty frenzied: British tabloids even outed the identity of the brain-dead donor. But Dinoire recovered better than anyone could have hoped. She was eating with her new lips within a week and talking shortly thereafter. Hot and cold sensation returned within a few months, as did most movement. Most important, she started leaving the house again, resuming her social life and meeting new people. The one facial movement that lagged was smiling – at ten months she could only have smile, like a stroke victim. But by fourteen months she could smile fully again. She had reason to.<\/p>\n
Culled from:\u00a0\u00a0The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n More vintage Halloween fun!<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/aa9a3346-a54a-4270-9190-b73c3d2858f1.jpg\")
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\nBefore and After<\/em><\/p>\nHalloween Cometh!<\/h3>\n