She woke up after the operation to find that she once more had a chin, eyelids and an ear. But she said the most important thing is that she can now smile properly for the very first time in 12 years. Ms Xu's parents were unable to afford to pay for her to possess plastic surgery but she was presented with hope when doctors offered to carry out the pioneering operation for free.
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It meant the girl from a tiny fishing village could receive the facial skin transplant which was carried out using tissue from her chest. The transplant team implanted a blood vessel from her leg into her chest and then used a water-filled balloon to expand her skin to generate enough to make her new face.
Video footage from the eight-hour surgery shows Ms Xu lying in a hospital bed, barely conscious and severely swollen, but with smooth flesh now replacing the ridged scars of her old face.
‘With her new face she will be able to express herself in a more precise way. She will even have the ability to blush when her emotions change, however it will need quite a long time,' her surgeon, Jiang Chenhong, claimed.
‘First, we took a piece of blood vessel fascia from her thigh and implanted it in her chest.
‘Then we inserted a skin expander beneath the element of skin where the blood vessel fascia was planted, so the part could expand and produce enough skin on her new face,' he added.
Chinese teams are said to have performed several similar transplant surgeries in recent months, including developing a new nose on an auto accident survivor's forehead.
China's first donor face transplant recipient, farmer Li Guoxing, received his new face in 2006 – less than the usual year following the world's first successful face transplant recipient, Isabelle Dinoir, was presented to media in France.
However, Mr Li died less than two years later, after stopping his anti-rejection medication. Since that time 10 surgeries of this kind have been performed in China.
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