Elmont Online

They savor pizza and burgers, no longer frighten children, and many of them can walk the streets without people knowing they have someone else's cheeks, nose, lips and skin. People who have had face transplants increasingly are going public, helping to transform an operation that six years ago was daredevil theory into one that is widely accepted.

At least 18 face transplants have been done around the world, starting with a French woman mauled by her dog in November 2005, said Dr. Maria Siemionow of Cleveland Clinic. She did the first face transplant in the U.S. in December 2008.

Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston has done three this year alone. The U.S. Department of Defense is providing money for more of these surgeries in Cleveland and Boston in hopes of helping soldiers disfigured in battle. The University of Pittsburgh plans to offer face transplantation soon.

On Thursday, the Boston hospital released a photo taken last month of Charla Nash, a Connecticut woman mauled by a chimpanzee. She had a face transplant in May.

"I will now be able to do things I once took for granted," Nash said in a statement. "I will be able to smell. I will be able to eat normally. I will no longer be disfigured. I will have lips and will speak clearly once again."

Nash, who's now living in a Boston-area nursing home, was attacked in February 2009 by a neighbor's 200-pound pet chimpanzee. Nash was left with no eyes and only a small opening where her mouth once was.

In late May, she underwent a full face and double hand transplant in Boston. It was the third full face transplant in the U.S.

Doctors later had to remove the hands because of complications that developed when Nash caught pneumonia. Nash said she's hoping to attempt another double hand transplant one day.

Not all face transplant recipients have recovered hoped-for capabilities yet, and some have less than stellar aesthetic results although they are all vastly improved from how they looked before. The more recent ones in particular, where full rather than partial transplants have been performed, have fared especially well.

"They look from the very beginning quite natural and quite normal," said Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, who has performed four face transplants at Brigham. "The level of normalcy," and to consider going out in public so soon, is "amazing," Pomahac added.

Here's how some others have fared:

Dallas Wiens, a 25-year-old Texan severely disfigured in a power line accident, looked like a sock of flesh had been pulled over his face -- no eyes or nose and barely a mouth. After his transplant earlier this year in Boston, he said the first thing his young daughter told him was "Daddy, you're so handsome." He said his new face felt "natural," and that right away he could smell the hospital's lasagna.

Connie Culp, 48, an Ohio woman who was the first U.S. face transplant recipient, has become an advocate for organ donation. Doctors have refined the droopy jowls and extra skin they purposely left to make checkup biopsies easier, and she now has "a normal face."