Surgeons of the Interregional Center for Children’s Maxillofacial Surgery on the basis of the Lviv OKHMATDYT performed a unique operation, forming a new nose for 8-year-old Eva. For this, a fragment of cartilage from the girl’s rib was used.
Before that, the child had already undergone 12 anesthesias, even the stitches were removed under anesthesia, and 4 operations. This was reported in the press service of the regional children’s hospital.
A girl named Eva from the Khmelnytskyi region was born with a defect in the facial skeleton – her nose was as if flattened. It was difficult for her to breathe, she often got sick and the problem prevented her from communicating with her peers. Surgeons from Kyiv tried to help her, but reconstructive surgery did not help. The child’s mother did not give up and decided to continue her daughter’s treatment.
“Our daughter actually didn’t have a nose. The baby and I were discharged from the maternity ward, we grew up, gained strength, and at 3 months we sought help from specialists in the capital. In Kyiv, we were advised to perform an operation on the child, but only at the baby’s mouth,” said the girl’s mother, Tanya.
Eva was operated on at the hip, then she underwent reconstructive surgery to install implants. However, the family did not have time to return home from Kyiv to Khmelnytskyi region, as suppuration began – the body rejected the artificial materials from which the nose was made. The implant suppurated on one side, Eva was taken to Kyiv again. The implant had to be removed, but very soon the story was repeated with the implant on the other side.
“He didn’t just fester, he climbed out and rested on the child’s eye. My husband trimmed it a little so as not to injure the eye and we could go to Kyiv to have it removed as well. So we are back to the starting point again. Our child was without a nose again,” says Eva’s mother.
The girl went to school and had to deal with complexes due to her appearance. The family decided to have another operation after learning about the visit of American maxillofacial surgeon Steve Orten to Okhmatdyt. The Interregional Center for Children’s Maxillofacial Surgery studied the girl’s medical records and offered Eva a solution to her problem – reconstructive rhinoplasty using costal cartilage.
“This is a modern technique that allows cartilage to be implanted in a place in the nose where it is not. In Eva’s case, there was no cartilage, the girl’s body rejected artificial implants, there was no point in trying to install one again. We went the other way – we used a fragment of our own cartilage from the girl’s rib. In this way, we formed Eva’s nose,” explained the girl’s doctor, surgeon Khrystyna Pogranichna.
The doctors are satisfied with the result of the operation – Eva can breathe freely, the nose has a good shape in accordance with the age of the child and the size of the head. To finally make sure that everything is okay with this courageous girl, she stayed in the hospital for several days under the supervision of the entire multidisciplinary team of the Center.
Today, the girl at home, according to Tanya’s mother, “flies around the house and teaches lessons.” And he also helps his mother prepare goodies for his older brother, who came home from school, conscientiously completes the homework that the teacher sends on Viber, in order to keep up with his 2nd grade.