This Woman Had America’s First Face Transplant. Then Nine Years On, See what she looks like now.

What comes to mind when you think of someone’s face? Their identity and how they look, perhaps? Well, one brave woman had to learn to live with her face being permanently unrecognizable after battling to overcome injuries almost too horrific to imagine.

Connie Culp suffered this dreadful fate after being shot at point-blank range back in 2004. The bullet was fired by her husband and hit her in the face, causing life-changing injuries. In fact, Culp, from Steubenville, Ohio, was left so badly disfigured that radical surgery was the only option. Consequently, she went on to receive a full face transplant—the first of its kind in the United States.

Tragically, Culp later said that she had an inkling something bad might happen to her one day. By all accounts, her husband Thomas had a hair-trigger temper and was a resentful sort. At the time of the shooting, the pair owned and managed a bar, the OK Corral, in Hopedale, Ohio. Thomas was jealous, and money was tight with the bar.

“We owned it together, and it put a strain on us,” Culp recalled.

Sometimes he would break things in the house when he got mad.

“And then that night, something just snapped,” she went on. “He got his shotgun and shot me.”

That night was September 20, 2004. The couple had been running the bar for just six months. The shooting took place in an apartment above the bar, and it changed Culp’s life forever.

The blast from her husband’s gun tore away a large part of Culp’s face. Her upper jaw, cheeks, and nose all vanished, leaving behind only her forehead, chin, and eyes. Miraculously, Culp survived, but the price she paid was enormous. Left without a nose, Culp was unable to smell. Minus most of her jaw, smiling was out of the question. Her sight, too, was ruined after fragments from the bullet all but blinded her.

After pulling the trigger on Connie, Thomas Culp turned the gun on himself, but like his wife, he survived. However, the murder-suicide attempt would later see him jailed for seven years.

Despite her horrific injuries, Culp recalls the life-changing moment with eerie clarity.

“I remember everything,” she said in September 2011. “That’s what the doctors can’t believe. I remember him lifting the gun and what he said to me, and then firing. It’s an image that will never leave me for the rest of my life.”

Culp spent the next few months under the surgeon’s knife as doctors treated her gruesome injuries. She had lost her right eye in the shooting and had only slight vision in her left, while the damage to the area around her nose was so severe that she underwent a tracheotomy just to be able to breathe.

Things were looking decidedly grim, so a plastic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio was called in to help. By coincidence, in October 2004, just weeks after the terrible shooting, the clinic had been granted permission to carry out a pioneering face transplant operation. Not knowing when a donor might become available, surgeons wondered if Culp might like to put herself forward as their very first patient. She readily agreed and underwent the first of a staggering thirty operations aimed at both repairing the existing damage and preparing her for future transplantation.

Tragically, Culp’s injuries had left her almost unrecognizable, and there was immense reconstructive work to be done. Moreover, the extent of her disfigurement meant that people would often stare at her whenever she ventured out in public. One encounter that stuck in her mind was the time a little girl came up to her in a grocery store and called her a monster. Culp took out her driver’s license so the child could see what she had looked like before the incident.

“I had a bad person shoot me,” Culp explained to her. “That’s why you never pick up a gun.”

Then, in October 2008, four years after the shooting, Culp was officially placed on the transplant waiting list. Astonishingly, just two months later, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic found a suitable match: Anna Kasper of Lakewood, Ohio, who had passed away from a heart attack, would become the donor for Culp’s groundbreaking operation.

The procedure took place in December 2008 and involved eight surgeons, twenty nurses, and an entire team of technical support staff. The operation itself lasted a grueling twenty-two hours, after which Culp spent twelve days in intensive care. Fortunately, the procedure proved a historic success, and Culp was discharged from the hospital fifty-eight days later, cementing her place as the first person in the United States to undergo a near-total face transplant.

Two years after the surgery, Culp spoke with CNN.

“I can smell now,” she said on December 27, 2010. “I can eat steak, I can eat almost any solid food. So it’s all getting better.”

However, Culp knew she would continue facing physical and emotional battles for the rest of her life.

“You still have to fight and live with the memories of why you needed a transplant every day,” she reflected the following September.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maria Siemionow, Director of Plastic Surgery Research at the Cleveland Clinic, who spearheaded the operation, was thrilled with the outcome.

“As you can see, we have now a healthy person and a happy person,” she stated, noting Culp’s restored ability to smile, frown, speak, and breathe through her new nose. Dr. Siemionow added that Culp had fully reintegrated into her community.

Given the ghastly events of September 2004, one might assume Culp harbored deep hatred toward her former partner, yet amazingly, she did not. Indeed, a year after her transplant, she confessed:

“I still love my husband. I forgave him the day he did it. I had to.”

Her magnanimous words notwithstanding, Culp still chose to put the marriage behind her and divorced Thomas Culp prior to his release from prison. Throughout it all, she leaned on her two children, Steven, 30, and Alicia, 28, both of whom remained unwavering pillars of support.

Fast forward to 2018, and Culp stood as a profound source of inspiration to others facing trauma and recovery. In January 2018, she visited the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to share her remarkable journey with volunteers, organ recipients, and donor families—a testimony that moved everyone in attendance.

Susan Stuart, CEO of CORE, was among those deeply touched.

“It gets tough when you’re out there in the community and people have misconceptions,” she observed. “It’s easy to just say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this again.’ But when you get to hear a story like Connie’s, it sure motivates you to say, ‘I want to go out there and I want to register as many people as I can.'”

In spite of the catastrophic consequences of the attack, Culp refused to let bitterness define her. On the contrary, she chose resilience, devoting her voice to championing organ donation and lifting others up.

“I was given a miracle when I survived the shooting,” she told the Daily Mail in September 2011. “Then I got a second miracle when I survived the face transplant. It’s still tough, but my life is so much better now.”

She concluded with a perspective forged through extraordinary perseverance:

“I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I want to be treated the same as I was my whole life before the shooting. After all, if I dwell on the past, I’ll have no life to live.”