She underwent a 15-hour operation in November 2005 in which surgeons transplanted the nose, lips and chin from a brain-dead donor at a hospital in Amiens.
[3] Dinoire took a large number of sleeping pills and neither woke up nor felt any pain while the dog mutilated her face.
[4] In a statement made on 6 February 2006, Dinoire said that "after a very upsetting week, with many personal problems, I took some pills to forget ...
Olivier Jardé, an orthopedic surgeon from Amiens and a member of the French National Assembly, said that both the donor and the recipient had attempted suicide.
[14] The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Dinoire on 27 November 2005 by Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Jean-Michel Dubernard at the Centre hospitalier Universitaire Nord in Amiens, France.
A triangle of face tissue, including the nose and mouth, was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient.
The French newspaper Le Monde's website explained on 2 December 2006 that the Associated Press had eliminated the picture, because "The hair of Isabelle Dinoire and the background of this image were manipulated by the source.
Complications have included kidney failure and two episodes of tissue rejection (one after one month and one after one year),[4] which have been suppressed by drugs.
A Boston doctor said if she stopped taking drugs, her scenario would be a "disaster", with the new face sloughing off over time.
[22] Part of her pre-operative screening included psychological evaluations to ensure she would be capable of maintaining her treatment regimen and also could accept and withstand the effects of having a dead person's face grafted onto her own.