Source: wellstonjournal.com
A woman who had her first rhinoplasty when she was just 14 years old has regained her confidence after having a fifth surgery to fix her misshapen ‘pig‘s nose.‘
Erika from Austin, , appeared on Monday night‘s episode of the E! reality series to meet with Dr. Paul Nassif and Dr. Terry Dubrow as a last-ditch effort to get the nose of her dreams.
‘My nose looks bulky, nice and wide, and you can see my nostrils — and I have a huge scar on my left side,‘ she explained in her testimonial.
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Erika said that she works at her family‘s restaurant and customers would actually come up to her and say her nose ‘looks ugly‘ or ask why she ‘that scar.‘
‘I wanna have pork on my menu, in my restaurant, not on my face,‘ she griped.
She said she never noticed her nose when she was a little girl, but that all changed when her cousin asked her, ‘Why do you have a pig‘s nose?‘
For her ‘sweet 15,‘ she asked her father for a nose job, and while he thought she was ‘crazy,‘ he eventually relented.
Erika was only 14 when her father found her a plastic surgeon in Austin who would perform the surgery.
‘Fourteen is a little bit too young for a girl to have a rhinoplasty,‘ Dr. Nassif told the camera. ‘The minimal age that I will do it is 15, as long as the girl has finished her growth spurt.‘
Two weeks after her surgery, Erika noticed a dent on the right side of her nose. She waited until the summer to go under the knife again for a second surgery.
After the procedure, there was a dent on the other side of her nose, so her father opted to find her another surgeon in Guadalajara, Mexico.
A few weeks after her third rhinoplasty, she noticed that ‘something was popping out‘ and a ‘little scar was appearing.‘
‘We actually called the surgeon and he tried to fix it, but I remember waking up in the middle of the surgery,‘ she recalled. ‘He was actually sewing me up.‘
‘Anesthesia awareness, where you‘re awake and experiencing the surgery, but you‘re paralyzed is one of the most devastating complications in all of anesthesia,‘ Dr. Dubrow explained in his testimonial. ‘It must be avoided at all costs.‘
Erika admitted she was too scared to go back to Guadalajara to ask to get her nose fixed for the fifth time.
‘I have a crooked nose,‘ she told the doctors, noting that she would like it straighter and narrower.
In the examining room, Dr. Nassif had Erika pinch her nostrils to show how narrow she would like her nose to be and then asked her to speak.
The exercise proved that making her nose any slimmer would not only give her a nasal voice, but it would also make it more difficult for her to breathe.
Erika showed the doctor a picture of her mother‘s nose, which is ‘perfect‘ in her eyes. Dr. Nassif finally realized that she wanted her nose to be longer.
‘I see what you want; however, there‘s not a lot of elasticity and stretch with your skin,‘ he told her. ‘When I lengthen a nose and the skin‘s not great, we can compromise the blood supply to the nose. There‘s a risk that the skin over your nose can die.‘
Erika felt like she was in ‘good hands,‘ and readily agreed to a fifth rhinoplasty.
‘If you‘re willing to take the risk, I‘m willing to take the risk,‘ he replied.
Dr. Nassif used rib bone, grafts, and microdermabrasion to reconstruct Erika‘s nose during the surgery, which was a success.
‘I‘ve been having problems with my nose since I was eight years old. I had four surgeries and I still had a pig‘s nose,‘ she said. ‘So, after all these years, I finally have the nose I deserve.
‘You know, I feel like I‘m empowered, and I just feel gorgeous. From today on, it‘s going to be a new Erika.‘
The mom was all smiles when she proudly showed off her new nose to her husband David, her son Mathias, and her longtime friend Jeanette.
‘Thanks to Dr. Nassif, my nose is longer, it‘s more narrow and you can‘t see into,‘ she told the camera.