A Chinese man has had a new nose grown on his forehead after neglecting his old one for too long.
After being involved in a traffic accident last year, twenty-two-year-old Xiaolian failed to seek medical treatment for his badly damaged sniffer. When he finally decided to have it looked at, doctors found that the nasal cartilage was too badly infected for repair.
Instead, staff at the hospital in Fuzhou applied a skin-tissue expander to his forehead and began cutting out a new nose with cartilage from his ribs.
Now, surgeons are happy with the nose's progress and say it will be transplanted to the traditional spot – between Xiaolian's eyes and mouth – soon.
Forehead tissue is often used to repair damaged noses because the skin is very similar.
Although it certainly looks peculiar, Xiaolian's case is actually quite normal in the world of reconstruction surgery. Last year, doctors grew a new ear on an American woman's arm! That’s surely a case of talk to the hand, eh?!
(ISSUE #25, OCTOBER 2013)
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