GAZING at her reflection for the first time since she received her pioneering face transplant, Isabelle Dinoire could not contain her delight.

“I have been looking at my face in the mirror,” she said, speaking by mobile phone from the hospital bed in Lyons, where she is recovering. “It is very impressive. They have given me back my face.”

For Dinoire, 38, an unmarried mother of two teenage girls, the 15-hour operation, completed last Monday, was the triumphant culmination of a daunting sequence of events that began last May when she fell in her council flat near the town of Valenciennes, northern France, after taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

Lisping but speaking with a surprisingly strong voice, Dinoire confirmed that she had taken the pills in an attempt to kill herself. She declined to say why she had wanted to die. A friend blamed a romantic disappointment.

Dinoire said that her black labrador had tried to revive her, probably licking her face at first but then biting her until she woke up. She was upset that the animal had to be destroyed. She believed it had saved her life.

Although horrifically disfigured, she no longer felt suicidal in the days that followed her mauling. She became an outpatient at the Amiens hospital where she was given extensive counselling.

She acquired another dog — a cocker spaniel — which her mother is caring for while she is in hospital. She is looking forward to being reunited with her family and her pet.

Dinoire said that she been living as a virtual outcast before being put on a waiting list in August for the operation. “I had to cover myself with a mask all the time,” she said. It would occasionally prompt insults from members of the public: “People thought I was worried about germs.”

A social worker who got to know Dinoire after she was injured said that even her daughters, aged 13 and 17, were frightened by her appearance.

Jean-Michel Dubernard, 64, the surgeon who carried out the transplant, said at a press conference on Friday that he had felt bound to intervene to improve her appearance.

More importantly, said doctors justifying the surgery, Dinoire was having trouble eating, breathing and talking without lips and part of her nose. A friend said, however, that the injuries had not stopped her smoking.

Last weekend her chance finally came. The 38-year-old donor, whose identity has not been revealed, was taken to a hospital in Lille, 75 miles north of Amiens, after hanging herself. She was brain dead on arrival.

Olivier Jardé, a professor of ethics at Amiens University hospital centre and who was on a committee that approved the procedure, said that many factors had to be taken into account to decide on her suitability as a donor.

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