For more information about organ and tissue donation: Call Life Connection of Ohio at (800) 535-9206 or visit www.donatelifeohio.org
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DAYTON — Connie Culp can do so many things she couldn’t do just a few years ago: take a sip from a glass of water, speak clearly without difficulty, smell her morning cup of coffee.
That’s all because she has regained something nearly all of us take for granted: a face.
Nearly two years ago, during a 23-hour surgery at the Cleveland Clinic, the 47-year-old became the first face transplant recipient in the United States.
She doesn’t know her donor’s identity, but she’ll forever be grateful to the woman who gave her life back to her.
Culp came to Dayton on Thursday afternoon to encourage others to do the same.
“I want to let everyone know how happy I am somebody would donate to me, and I wish more people would donate,” she said before speaking to health-care providers at an event sponsored by Life Connection of Ohio (LCO). The agency serves as the link between the organ donor and transplant recipient, coordinating the recovery last year of organs from 46 donors resulting in 145 organ transplants.
Culp was shot in the face by her husband, Tom, in an attempted murder-suicide in 2004. The shotgun blast nearly killed her and destroyed most of her face. One of her eyes is prosthetic and she is legally blind in the other. Since the transplant the Bloomingdale, Ohio grandmother can speak intelligibly and has resumed eating a normal diet. She can chase after her two young grandsons.
Cathi Arends of Life Connection of Ohio said that the percentage of Ohioans registered as organ donors has leapt from 46 percent 10 years ago to 54 percent today, but demand still far outpaces supply. There are 108,000 currently on the transplant waiting list in the United States, but only 24,000 transplants took place last year.
Arends said that more than 2,000 Ohioans died during the last 10 years waiting for an organ transplant and that 18 men, women and children die each day in the United States waiting for an organ.
“It’s important for everyone to register as a donor,” Culp exhorted her audience, “because you never know what tomorrow will bring.”
Even after 23 conventional plastic surgeries, Culp’s disfigured face still frightened children in the grocery store. She had no nose, and only a slumping half question-mark of a mouth.
“One little girl called me a monster,” Culp recalled. “Kids don’t know what they’re doing; they just say what they think.”
Instead of being offended, she used it as a teachable moment, showing the child a picture of herself before a shotgun blast destroyed half of her face and telling her, “It doesn’t matter what you look like; what matters is what you are inside.”
It is because of that indomitable spirit that the Cleveland Clinic selected Culp as the first face transplant recipient in the United States. “I don’t think we would have attempted it without someone as strong as Connie,” said Cheryl Smith, the reconstructive transplantation coordinator for the Cleveland Clinic.
Smith said Culp’s transplant was the most complicated to date “because there were so many components, bone, muscle, nose, palate.”
Smith showed the audience a slide of Culp before she was shot in the face by her husband — a beautiful, strong woman who could lug heavy equipment as part of her job in the family painting business.
Her husband turned the gun on himself but also survived and is serving seven years in prison. Culp no longer communicates with him.
“I’d rather not dwell on the past,” she said.
Smith told the audience that Culp suffered massive trauma to the middle of her face and that the transplant wasn’t merely cosmetic, but functional: “She was breathing through a tracheotomy and eating through a feeding tube. She was in constant pain.”
Smith then surprised the audience by introducing Culp, who had been sitting in the audience with her daughter, Alicia, and 3-year-old grandson, Maddox. Alicia earned a nursing assistant license so she could serve as her mother’s primary caregiver.
Culp sat on a couch and joked and chatted with the audience, displaying the sense of humor and strong sense of self that have helped her through her ordeal.
She told them she was a registered donor at the time of the shooting: “Don’t delay getting registered, and don’t let your family decide for you. I could have died, and I don’t think my family knew I wanted to donate.”
It was the parents of her donor who made the decision for their daughter who hadn’t made her wishes known. “I know we had a lot in common, same height and age and skin tone,” she said. “Other than that I don’t know anything about her, but I believe her mom and dad made the call. I appreciate that, that would be a hard call to make for my kids.”
She said her face today doesn’t resemble the donor’s, because they rebuilt her nose and cheek bones and with collagen.
Culp considers the Cleveland Clinic staff her second family, and she’s proud of her role as a transplant pioneer. “I definitely hope I’m paving the way for other patients,” she said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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