Tom was attacked by a dog and had to undergo several painful
reconstructions to his nose.
Tom, an advertising sales manager in his
twenties, had just started a new job and was out for a night with his mates
from work. Theyd had a few drinks at a
party and were on their way home when they stopped at a petrol station in the
East End of London to call for a taxi.
His friends were buying supplies in the shop, and Tom stopped to stroke
a dog that was tied up outside the garage.
The dog let himself be petted, but as Tom turned away the dog suddenly
leapt up and their faces collided. He
felt blood gush from his nose. At first
I thought the dog had head-butted me and it was just a nose-bleed, says Tom.
The owner of the dog came out, as the
ambulance and police arrived. One
policeman checked out the dog, quickly concluding that it was a bull mastiff
and not on the dangerous dogs list. The
other suggested that it was my fault for petting the dog, Tom says, and the
owner was allowed to take the dog home.
I waited for hours in the hospital, thinking a few stitches would be
enough - I still didnt realise the dog had taken off a large chunk off my
nose. When the plastic surgeon arrived
he was shown the tip that the dog had bitten off, which his friend had
collected from the forecourt and carried to hospital in a bag with frozen peas.
The surgeons did their best to sew the tip
back on but this was just the start of several operations over three years to
rebuild his face. Within a few weeks the replaced tip started to die, turn
black and smell really bad of decaying flesh.
As he waited for the operation Tom went through the hell of 3-4 weeks
with white gauze on the end of his nose. He could still breathe and eat, but
without the bandage, he looked most peculiar and people were quite taken aback
when they saw him. A maxillofacial
surgeon was called in to design a solution.
Tom was offered a choice of having skin taken from his cheek or forehead
to create a new nose tip. In the end a
triangle of skin from his eyebrow to hairline was pulled down with the blood
supply still attached and was fitted to what was left of his nose. Several more operations were needed to
sculpt the nose into a normal shape, using a tiny piece of cartilage taken from
his left ear, which now sticks out at a slightly different angle. During other operations, the tip was adjusted
a bit at a time and the excess fat from the forehead skin was trimmed. One
patch of the nose died again and scabbed over, scaring Tom that hed have to go
through all that again, but this turned out to be manageable. His nose today looks perfectly normal, though
Tom can tell that one nostril is slightly different to before, and he notices
the scar on his forehead more than anyone else.
