Paris - When Isabelle Dinoire received the world's first face transplant two years ago, doctors warned she might never be able to kiss again.
Now the 40-year-old Frenchwoman can eat, speak and smile normally, according to Isabelle's Kiss, a book on her odyssey released this week.
But the surgeons who conducted the pioneering operation to replace her mouth, nose and chin, warned Dinoire the transformation only would be truly complete when she managed to pull her facial muscles into the shape of a kiss.
"Every day she practises," writes the book's author Noelle Chatelet, who spent four months at Dinoire's side after the life-changing surgery in November 2005. "She is so close now to giving that kiss."
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'I will never forget that moment' Mixing narrative and interviews with Dinoire, the book takes the reader from the day the young woman was rushed to hospital in May 2005 after being disfigured by her dog, to the press conference the following February at which she revealed her new face to the world.
It offers the first behind-the-scenes account of Dinoire's operation and process of physical and mental recovery, since she left her northern hometown of Valenciennes to escape media pressure.
After the accident, "I didn't want people to look at me," Dinoire says. "I had the face of a monster."
"The hardest part was the nose, because you could see the bone," she says. "It made me think of a skeleton, it made me think of death."
The following November, in a groundbreaking operation, Dinoire was given the mouth, nose and chin of a donor - a French suicide victim - and a chance at a "new life". "I will never forget that moment," she says.
'The hardest thing to accept was to have the inside of someone else's mouth' The author, who spent four months at Dinoire's side, says she was struck by her "exceptional courage", and was convinced she had emerged stronger from the ordeal.
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