The chance to a normal life reclaimed after nasal reconstruction surgery

Following an automobile accident, AH, a teenager from Sibiu, suffered a serious nose injury, an episode that triggered 17 failed surgical interventions, performed in Romania and Italy. In just one day, this young life changed. Because of the mutilated nose, she had to isolate and the array of failed operations merely exacerbated her psychological trauma.

In 2011, the young 17 year old was consulted by Dr. Mihai Aşchilian, who proposed to operate at Marienhospital in Stuttgart with Professor Wolfgang Gubisch and Dr. Helmut Fischer, Germany’s two renowned experts in nasal reconstruction. An intervention soon followed, for positioning of a tissue expander and constantly filling it with a saline solution (liquid), in order to obtain the amount of skin necessary to cover the entire nasal area. The preoperative preparation stage lasted seven months, and in 2012 the moment of the intervention itself arrived.

At 9:00, the three doctors entered the operating room. The nasal reconstruction meant performing four interventions: taking a costal cartilage, which was later covered with front flap and finishing it by degreasing. This complex procedure lasted ten hours, and the patient remained hospitalized for seven days. Three weeks after the first intervention another minor one followed, needed to cover the structures reconstructed of costal cartilage.

Six months after the surgery performed in Stuttgart, the patient could look herself in the mirror again. The last post nasal reconstruction surgery rendered to the young women the opportunity to resume her life from before the accident.