Wednesday’s Hot Topic: Connie Culp

There were a lot of choices for today’s hot topic, from American Idol’s Adam Lambert and his rendition of Led Zepplin’s Whole Lotta Love on last night’s Idol performance to the US Navy’s new supership, the USS Freedom, so why, do you ask, did I choose this name — someone you may have never heard of before (I know I hadn’t)?

Because HER story goes beyond the trivialness that is the Idol experience and supercedes the reasons we need a ship like the Freedom. Her story brings hope, inspiration and a medical miracle to light.

While she isn’t the first in the world to receive a face transplant, she was the first in America to receive one.

photo from Huffington Post

Even before her transplant, Ms. Culp showed a lot of spunk by going out in public with the face her husband ruined with a shotgun blast in 2004. The blast destroyed her nose, upper jaw, one eye and cheeks. She was on life support for months and underwent some 30 surgeries that left her with the face on the left in this photo.  On Dec. 10, 2008, in a 22-hour operation, Dr. Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who replaced 80 percent of Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died.

She was reviled by those who saw her but only responded by explaining “I’m not a monster. I’m a person who was shot,” and displaying her driver’s license to show what she had looked like before the shooting.

In her interview at the Cleveland Clinic, Ms Culp only had praise and thanks for the doctors who performed the miracle and for the family who donated the tissue that went to restore her face. Her whole attitude has been positive and forward-thinking.

Although her surgeries are not all finished, and her body must still grow nerves and learn to work the muscles in the face to give her a less wooden appearance, she has come a long way from the shattered and deformed person she was five years ago. She can eat normally and smell — two things she had not been able to do for the previous 5 years!

Much like our lesson from Susan Boyle, we have another on not judging a person on their appearance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How would you deal with meeting someone in Sears who looked like Culp’s before photo? Would you recoil, be disgusted or afraid? Would you feel sorry for her? Could you look past her face and see the person underneath? Would you try?

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