"People no longer stop and stare at me in the street. They don't make fun of me anymore," Pascal Coler told ABC.
Coler is also working as an accountant, plans to play basketball and tennis again, and hopes to get married and start a family.
Before his surgery last year, Coler had to live a reclusive life to hide his face, which had been disfigured beyond recognition by tumors for 24 years. The tumors were caused by a rare genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis.
In January 2007, Laurent Lantieri, the head of plastic surgery at Henri-Mondor Hospital in Creteil, France led a team of doctors in transplanting a donor's face to Coler in the world's first surgery of its kind. For 16 hours, the surgeons cut his facial skin away and painstakingly connected arteries, veins and nerves of the new lips, cheeks, nose and mouth.
After the surgery, Coler does not look like the anonymous donor because his bone structure was not changed.
