The French woman who underwent the world's first partial face transplant said on Monday she was grateful simply to have a face "like everybody else" and hopes to resume a normal life quickly.
Isabelle Dinoire, 38, smiled and laughed awkwardly in her first appearance before reporters since the operation in November and spoke in slurred and laboured tones.
She still has fine scar lines running from her nose down to her jaw, dividing her upper face from the transplanted lower area, and does not seem to be able to close her mouth.
"Since the day of the operation I have had a face like everybody else," Dinoire told a packed news conference at Amiens hospital in north-eastern France.
"I am now able to open my mouth and eat. Recently, I have also been able to feel my lips, my nose, my mouth," she said, adding that feeling was returning slowly and she felt no pain.
Dinoire was left disfigured after she was mauled by her own dog last May and surgeons gave her a new nose, lips and chin. "Every day, when I left my house, I had to face up to people's stares and what they were thinking," she said.
Doctors did not show of a picture of Dinoire before the attack or before the operation, although she said she was happy when she looked in the mirror for the first time after surgery.
She said she was happy with her new face and regarded it as her own. "I can now smile and make faces so I think I have taken over the face," she said. Asked about her plans for the future, she said: "I want to resume a normal life."
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