Woman with facial deformity so bad she couldn’t EAT without hurting herself begs Botched docs for help
Starrina was stunned to learn she'd been misdiagnosed for 30 years
THE doctors on Botched by Nature have seen quite a lot, but their latest case is amazing even by their standards.
Starrina is from Arizona and had a growth by her mouth which was so large she would end up chewing her own SKIN whenever she tried to eat.
The doctor she’d last seen told her she had a hemangioma, which is a non-cancerous growth caused by a group of blood vessels.
After the show’s doctors Paul Nassif and Terry Dubrow had a look though, she got some shocking news.
It turned out the woman had been misdiagnosed for 30 YEARS.
A hemangioma usually gets smaller as time goes on, but Starrina’s had grown.
It was actually something called a vascular malformation, which is a blood vessel abnormality which means pools of blood had collected in the mass.
The good news was the team felt they could help Starrina, but they’d need to do a couple of operations.
Stage one meant having a kind of foam squirted into lump to help the blood vessels inside shrink – the procedure is called an embolization.
After that there was an operation to make the mass smaller.
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“This is something that's very difficult - there's a risk of injuring one of those nerves, bleeding, more scar formation,” Paul said before the second op.
“Not that anything we do is simple but in Starrina's case is exceptionally difficult and risky. We're really not going to know what's going on until we get in there.”
Although she understood the risks, Starrina was excited about the prospect of reducing the growth.
She felt like she’d spent her “whole life” waiting to have it put right.
Usually the two doctors help patients themselves, but this time around they asked another medic to step in to help as the case was so unusual.
Dr Greg Levitin is a specialist in vascular malformations, and was on hand to lend a hand.
The surgery involved removing lip tissue and making cuts inside Starrina’s mouth.
Although it sounds brutal and she had to have another embolization, Starrina was eventually thrilled with the results.
It didn’t end there though, with the medics telling her she needed another surgery to make her cheek smaller in the future.
“Seeing the doctors so excited makes me more excited and I can finally see the finish line,” she said.