The Associated Press reports that Culp, a 46-year-old Ohio mother of two, has stepped into the limelight five months after her groundbreaking surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. She looks nothing like she once did. Her new face came from a dead woman who donated her organs. Granted, Culp's face is bloated and squarish-looking, her expressions are stilted and her speech is a bit difficult to understand, but she can now do what matters most: talk, smile, smell and taste her food again. Right now, there is facial skin that droops in big folds, but her surgeons will cut that away as her circulation improves, nerves grow and muscles become animated.
But even with all that, Culp is thrilled with her new look. "I guess I'm the one you came to see today," she said at the opening of the news conference and then added, "I think it's more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person's face." All details about this patient--from her name to the injury that caused the horrible --have been a secret until now. The injury occurred in 2004 when her former husband, Thomas, shot her and then turned the gun on himself. Both lived. He went to prison for seven years. She was left barely alive with wounds that shattered her nose, cheeks, the roof of her mouth and her eye. AP reports that hundreds of fragments of shotgun pellet and bone splinters were embedded in her face. Even her windpipe was affected so a tube was needed so she could breathe. The only part of her face left intact were her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin.
Culp endured 30 operations to try to fix her face as plastic surgeons used parts of her ribs to create cheekbones and a leg bone for an upper jaw. Even with all that, she couldn't eat solid food, smell or breathe on her own. And then her world changed. On December 10, Dr. Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors in a 22-hour operation to replace 80 percent of Culp's face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died. Culp was the fourth person in the world to have a face transplant, but hers was far more extensive than the other three. Now she can eat real food, including pizza, chicken, hamburgers and cookies with coffee.
You won't believe what your face tells others about you!
"I'm not a monster." Before the transplant, she was out shopping and overheard a child say to his mother, "You said there were no real monsters, Mommy, and there's one right there." So Culp turned to that mother and child and said, "I'm not a monster. I'm a person who was shot," and pulled out her driver's license to show the child what she used to look like. Then she offered these words of advice for us all: "When somebody has a disfigurement and don't look as pretty as you do, don't judge them, because you never know what happened to them. Don't judge people who don't look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might be all taken away."
A woman's face is most beautiful and alluring one time each month. Click to find out when that is!
