A Frenchwoman who had the world's first partial face transplant appeared in public today for the first time since her operation to tell a press conference: "I now have a face like everyone else."

Although Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old mother of two, is still unable to move her lips properly and her speech is slurred and hard to understand, she thanked the doctors who undertook the operation and the family of the donor who gave her new lips, a chin and a nose.

"I want to resume a normal life," Mme Dinoire told reporters at Amiens hospital in northeastern France, where she received her new face in a 15-hour operation last November. "A door to the future is opening."

Mme Dinoire was mauled by her pet labrador last May after a drugs overdose, although the surgeon who led the transplant team has denied that she had been trying to commit suicide. The woman whose face she was given was later revealed to have hanged herself.

Before being mauled by her dog, Mme Dinoire had a broad nose, thin lips and prominent chin. Now her nose is straighter, her lips fuller and her chin smaller. She has fine scar lines running from her nose over her cheekbones down to her jaw and seemed to have difficulty closing her mouth.

Mme Dinoire told today's press conference that she first realised the extent of her injuries after trying to light a cigarette only to find that she had no lips left. "From that day on my life changed," she said.

Reconstructive surgery helped her to regain her speech, but she was aware of how people looked at her in her home town of Valenciennes, near Amiens, and accepted her doctors' suggestion that she should undergo the pioneering operation.

Since then she has gradually being regaining sensation, although it is too early for her to have full nerve function, if she ever does.

"I can open my mouth and eat. I feel my lips, my nose and my mouth," said Mme Dinoire, who lifted a cup to her lips and appeared to drink while one of her surgeons was speaking.

Mme Dinoire, a divorced mother of two teenage daughters, spoke frankly about the horrific attack in May. She said she had passed out when the dog bit her, and that she did not immediately realise the extent of her disfigurement when she awoke.

"When I woke up, I tried to light a cigarette, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t hold it between my lips," she said. She added that she then went to look at herself in a mirror and was horrified by what she saw.

The operation on November 27 was conducted by Bernard Devauchelle, a professor of facial surgery at the Amiens hospital. He worked with Jean-Michel Dubernard, a surgeon at the Edouard Herriot hospital in Lyon who performed the world’s first hand transplant in September 1998, followed by the first double hand and forearm transplant in January 2000.

Since the operation she has remained in convalescence at the Amiens hospital, spending her time knitting and occasionally exercising on a cycling machine. Against her doctors' advice, she has also started smoking again.

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