Brand-new nose miracle after beach horror
Published: April 5, 2006
When friends look at Elsie van Tonder they tell her surgeons have performed a miracle in reconstructing her nose. Six months ago, she had her nose bitten off by a seal which she thought was in difficulty and tried to help.
Following the attack the mother-of-two from George had difficulty breathing and surgeons at Groote Schuur Hospital told her she had months of reconstructive surgery ahead of her.
Since then she has undergone three major operations and several smaller ones to reconstruct her nose, with surgeons using photographs of how she looked before the accident to guide them.
Yesterday, Van Tonder, 49, returned to the hospital - her ninth visit - and today she will undergo a further small operation.
She said: “When I look in the mirror now I smile but before I didn’t want to look at myself as I would get upset.
“When it first happened I was very scared of how I’d look, but I trusted the doctors and I’m very happy with my new nose.”
She said her sense of smell had now returned.
Van Tonder’s nose was bitten off by a seal at Herold’s Bay near George last November.
She thought the seal was in difficulty and tried to roll it back into the water with a blanket, but it charged and bit her.
The attack left her with both skin and cartilage damage to her nose, so surgeons had to take skin tissue from her forehead and cartilage from her ear.
The skin from her forehead was a perfect match for her nose because of its texture and colour.
The surgery has left a scar on her forehead, which looks like a long frown line, and she has scars on her nose.
The hospital’s consultant specialist plastic and reconstructive surgeon, Stuart Geldenhuys, said the operations had been successful and there had been no complications.
He said: “We will continue to remove tissue in certain areas because what we want is to get to a point where she has a normal nose. We want to get the contours of her nose correct and improve the symmetry of it.”
He said the hospital dealt with about one case of nose reconstruction a month, but they had never had to deal with a seal bite before.
“This has been a first. We are more used to dealing with human bites.”
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: