On November 27, 2005, 38-year-old Isabelle Dinoire was the first person to ever undergo a face transplant intervention, after being severely attacked by her dog. The consequences of the attack were the amputation of her distal nose, her upper and lower lips, the entire chin and parts of her right and left cheeks. The donor was a brain-dead 46-year-old woman with the same blood group (O+) and five compatible HLA antigens.

The intervention was not only controversial and risky, but also required multiple approvals from the Local Protection of Persons Committee, the French Agency for Health Safety and the French Biomedicine Agency. The surgeon responsible for the face transplant was Jean-Michel Dubernard, who admitted that not only was the intervention a difficult one, but the recovery process was even more complicated.

According to a report published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the patient was able to drink and eat within the first week after the surgery, although the leakage from her mouth completely disappeared only 12 months later. Heat and cold sensations were close to normal 4 months after the intervention.

The same report also mentions that the sensory recovery was much faster then the motor one, as the patient was able to move her upper lip only 4 months after the transplant. The smile was still incomplete after 4 months, and remained asymmetric for the first 10 months, becoming normal only 2.5 years after.

The post-operatory recovery was the part specialists feared the most, more than the intervention itself. One of the first bad signs was the experimental infusion of bone marrow stem cells from the patient’s donor. The immune system did not tolerate the graft, so the doctors had to use immune-suppressing drugs, which Dinoire will have to take for the rest of her life.

Despite the immune-suppressing treatment, the body’s natural rejection response appeared 18 days after the operation, and also six months later. For the time being, the patient receives an experimental treatment that doctors hope will prevent future rejections.

Isabelle Dinoire is happy with her new face despite the complications, and says she is not afraid to walk or meet anyone. "Everyone in the world said this should not be done because the world was not ready and the risks were too high," said Dr. David M. Young, assistant professor of plastic surgery at UC San Francisco. “The French medical team has beaten the odds."