A woman who lost part of her face when a dog tore chunks out of her lip in a brutal attack has been transformed by TV’s Botched surgeons.
Karissa Weckesser, 24, was at a friend’s house playing with her dog when it launched at her, prompting her to black out from the pain. When she awoke she was in the emergency room as surgeons prepared to repair the damage to her face.
Physicians attempted to use the flesh that had been torn off, but there was too much tissue damage, and so they took a piece from her lower lip and ‘rolled it up’ on her upper lip to minimise the space left where the dog had bitten Karissa.
But in last night’s episode of Botched, surgeons Dr. Terry Dubrow and Dr. Paul Nassif were able to improve the results by ‘shortening’ her upper lip.
Karissa was thrilled with the results and said she could ‘see my old self again’.
Karissa got her lip corrected after she lost part of her face when she was attacked by a dog
Doctors in the emergency room didn’t risk reattaching her flesh because the tissue had died
At first the surgeons were unsure if they would be able to fix her mouth as the emergency room doctors had failed to attach the chunk of flesh she had lost when they originally operated.
Dr Nassif explained to Karissa: ‘So what they did was they took a piece of your lower lip and kind of rolled it up to fill that defect.
‘Before doing an aggressive procedure like that, we would’ve maybe just put the tissue together and just see how it heals because it does shorten the sides of your mouth.’
‘At this point, I really don’t know if I’m going to be able to help Karissa. I just hope that her doctor has not done irreversible damage,’ he told the camera.
Surgeons used a part of her lower lip to roll up on her upper lip to fill the wound but left her with a hanging piece of flesh
Karissa was at a friend’s house and playing with her dog when the animal launched into an unprovoked attack
Botched surgeons Dr. Terry Dubrow and Dr. Paul Nassif were unsure whether they’d be able to fix the injury
Fortunately they were able to repair her lip by trimming the dropping skin over her mouth.
Karissa, who was left unable to eat properly because of her injury, was thrilled.
She said: ‘After a few unsuccessful reconstruction attempts, I had lost all hope that I would ever be able to eat, feel, or look normal ever again.
Karissa blacked out during the attack which is a common way the brain tries to protect itself
Surgeons were able to fix the damage by shortening her lip and fixing it back into place
They said they would have used her flesh during the original operation to see if it would take
‘Thanks to Dr. Nassif I can open my mouth more and when I look in the mirror I see my old self.’
The surgeons told Karissa that blacking out during the incident was common during trauma as it is the brain’s way of protecting itself, but it meant she couldn’t remember what happened to her.
‘A year ago this month, I went to my friend’s house,’ Karissa said. ‘We were playing with the dog, you know, hanging out.’
Karissa’s (left and right before the attack) injury meant she was unable to eat properly with an extra bit of skin over her lip
She worried that she wouldn’t ever feel ‘normal’ again because of the damage her injury caused
She became emotional in the surgeons’ office as she revealed the impact of her injury
She continued. ‘I just remember literally picking up something from the floor and then I remember just being in the ER.’
Karissa said she remembers ‘flipping out’ when she realised what the dog had done to her face.
A friend of Karissa’s who was present on the day of the attack gave the doctors her recollection of the day’s traumatic events.
Helping hand: Karissa’s friend recounted the traumatic course of events that occurred
Striking: Karissa’s friend said that she ‘started flipping out’ when she saw the damage the dog had done to her face
Hoping for help Karissa said, ‘I’m so young and I don’t want to look like this the rest of my life’
‘I was in the bathroom when the bite actually happened,’ she said. ‘So I go out and my friend’s face is missing, so I started flipping out – I call 911, ambulance came.’
Karissa’s friend said emergency workers retrieved the missing piece of flesh and ‘put it on ice in the ambulance.’
‘They had it on ice and the surgeon tried to replace it, but there was so much tissue damage and nerve damage that he couldn’t connect it – it was dead tissue,’ she said.
Scary: Karissa said she blacked out in the incident, saying, ‘I just remember literally picking up something from the floor and then … just being in the ER’
Karissa became emotional in the surgeons’ office revealing how desperate she was to get her injury fixed.
She said: ‘It’s really hard. It’s like I’m so young and I don’t want to look like this for the rest of my life. I don’t.’
New episodes of Botched air Wednesday evenings on E! at 9/8c.