A Woman Was Attacked By A Dog As Child– Now She Has Hair Growing Out of Her Cheek
Over the course of its five-season run, fans of the E! series “Botched” have seen it all. The series follows doctors Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif remedy the disasters at the hands of extreme plastic surgeries. Together the two doctors have the most bizarre scenarios in plastic surgery from a woman whose breasts morphed in a “uni-boob” after a botched job, to a woman whose face was filled with cement. Once, a patient showed up to the doctors with the desire to be transformed into an alien-look alike. In the most recent episode of the series, the doctors have their work cut out for them when a woman whose surgery left her with pubic hair sprouting from her face came on the show to ask for help.
Crystal Coombs appeared on the show to have a surgery that she’d had at age 9 fixed for the good of her self-esteem.
Not too many years ago, a serious dog bite to the face would undoubtedly lead to extreme disfigurement for the rest of a person’s life. Today, doctors have been able to improve their techniques for patching up the results of these attacks all with the help of plastic surgery. For Coombs, who had been attacked and bitten by a dog decades ago when she was 9 years old, this proved to be very true.
“When I was 9 years old, my grandfather was holding the dog, and I was actually pretty terrified of the pitbull,” Coombs told the doctors in the episode. “All I remember is black.”
“Full attack mode?” Dubrow asks her while Nassif asked, “So he bit out the chunk of tissue?”
“Clean,” Coombs replied. “Then went to the emergency room, and there the doctors suggested that we wait until we see a plastic surgeon.”
At the time, Coombs had been left with a gaping wound which she told the doctors of “Botched” had been “open for a while. Like how the outside of Freddie Kruger’s face looks, with the burn? That’s what the inside looked like.” Fortunately, after some time, Coombs saw a plastic surgeon who was able to create a skin graft for her. With a complex procedure, he took skin from her groin and created the graft. Sadly, when puberty began for Coombs, so did another painful aspect of her scarring.
“So you were getting pubic hair on your face?” Nassif asks her in the episode.
The answer? Yes. Yes, she did.
Coombs began to grow pubic hair on her face.
“Yes. Literal pubic hair. I don’t believe that the doctor mentioned I would grow pubic hair out of my patch,” she explained while speaking to the doctors. “I don’t remember that.” Fortunately, Coombs seemed to have a bit of sense of humor about the growth of hair despite the fact that it was sprouting from her cheek.
Nassif later explained on the show that Coombs, while suffering from an odd predicament was lucky. “Crystal is very lucky that the emergency room physicians didn’t just try to stitch up that big gash and opening in her cheek because the ER doctor does not have the same skill set as a plastic surgeon,” Nassif explained. “If they did, she would’ve been like this–.” Nassif tugged his eye down to show what it might have looked like for her.
Speaking to the doctors about the hair growing from her akee, Coombs explained that she had been fine with the growth before her daughter was born.
Coombs told the doctors that the odd graft hadn’t really affected her life or self-esteem until she became a mother. “Now since having my daughter, I really started to get conscious of it,” Coombs, who is the mother of a 6 months old, explained. “I’m worried about the kids that she’ll go to school with… “After having my daughter, I am very nervous about how other kids will treat her because of how I look. I don’t want her to be teased.”
Coombs asked the doctor if they could help her with reconstructive surgery that would be as small and minimal as possible.
Dubrow later explained that the surgery needed to reconstruct Coomb’s face is “actually very deceptively complicated” because “that skin graft is very close to critical anatomical structures like the nose, the cheeks, and the eye, that if altered even a little bit can change the entire shape of the face and look very deformed.”
Eventually, the doctors performed the surgery for Coombs and the transformation was quite remarkable.
Speaking about her end results, Coombs explained “Before, I was way too self-conscious,” Crystal recalled. “And now, I’m no longer worried about Sana having to go through 21 questions about what’s on my face. I’m excited, I feel beautiful…it’s like a closed chapter.”
