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Cleveland Clinic surgeons have performed the nation’s first near total face transplant, officials said on Tuesday. The patient is a woman who was not identified.

The Cleveland surgical team, led by Dr. Maria Siemionow, said it had replaced about 80 percent of the patient’s face with that of a dead woman in the last two weeks. The doctors offered no details on the patient, but said they would discuss her surgery at a news conference on Wednesday.

Recent improvements in managing the care of transplant surgical patients, including the use of better anti-rejection drugs, have allowed doctors to forge into new areas of tissue transplants, including the hands and face.

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She can eat pizza. And hamburgers. She can smell perfume, drink coffee from a cup, and purse her lips as if to blow a kiss. Except that one lip is hers, and the other is from a dead woman. She is the nation's first face transplant patient, and on Thursday night, she went home from a Cleveland hospital. "I'm happy about myself," she told her doctors.

"She accepted her new face," said Dr. Maria Siemionow, the Cleveland Clinic reconstructive surgeon who led the historic operation in early December.

The woman's identity has not been revealed, and hospital officials won't say where she went. She and her family have declined requests for an interview.

 

She suffered a traumatic injury several years ago, the details of which doctors also won't reveal. But it left the woman with no nose, palate, or way to eat or breathe normally. In a 22-hour procedure, 80 percent of her face was replaced with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died.

It was the fourth partial face transplant in the world, though the others were not as extensive.

The patient's recovery has been astonishing, Siemionow said. She shows no signs of rejecting her new face, is doing well on standard immune-suppressing drugs, and can breathe normally instead of through a hole in her windpipe.

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