Women's Face Repaired After Disastrous Cancer Treatment
Plastic surgeon saves the day and repairs radiation victim's face.
It's a terrible thing when procedures don't go as planned, especially with something as serious as cancer treatment. The right side of Kotelevskaya's face was disfigured after doctors in Kazakhstan told her she had a cancerous tumor in her jawbone, and she received 40 sessions of intense radiation.
Kotelevskaya began undergoing surgery Monday to correct damage from unneeded radiation after a cancer misdiagnosis in Kazakhstan.
It was a complex facial surgery and repairing the damage safely seemed unlikely.
The 16-hour surgery ended early Tuesday morning, which was much earlier than expected. Kotelevskaya is otherwise young and healthy and the plastic surgery team team encountered no complications or roadblocks.
"It couldn't have gone any better. I'm ecstatic about how everything went," said Dr. Little, who donated his services. "She's in the intensive care unit now, and she's doing great."
The surgery involved removing a large portion of her cheek, jawbone and the inside of her mouth, and then taking a fibula bone from her leg, along with blood vessels and skin, and building a new jaw from that bone. It's an extremely risky surgery that hasn't been done very often.
Plates and screws were used to affix the new bone to her existing facial bone. Blood vessels were then reconnected to those in the neck, with the skin attached to the bone becoming the inside of her mouth. Skin from her neck was then moved up to reconstruct her cheek.
The treatment created a hole through her skin, cost her some of her teeth, and made it impossible for her to open her jaw very far. She lost her business and her husband, sunk into poverty, and at one point became homeless while raising a young son. Who would have known that a plastic surgeon would save the day.
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