Tessa Evans, from Maghera, Ireland, suffers from an exceptionally rare medical condition called complete congenital arhinia, which means she was born without a nose.
Arhinia is so rare that there are only 47 reported cases in the medical record, and it leaves Tessa with no sense of smell or sinusitis, although she can cough, sneeze, and catch a cold.
She has now just undergone a pioneering operation to insert a mold into her face, stretch her skin and slowly build up her missing facial feature.
Two-year-old Tessa Evans was born without a nose due to a rare medical condition.
Tessa has become the first person to have a cosmetic nasal implant fitted to help create the missing appendage.
Tessa’s parents, Grainne, 31, and Nathan Evans, 33, made the difficult decision for her daughter to undergo this new procedure to begin creating a nose when she was still a toddler. She appears in the photo before the operation.
Tessa has just undergone a pioneering operation to insert a mold into her face, stretching her skin and slowly building up the missing facial feature. It will be carried out in a series of operations over several years.
She will undergo more surgeries to have the implant replaced as she grows, so that her nose “grows” with her face.
Then, when she is a teenager, she will receive the definitive prosthesis, which will be tattooed with light and dark tones to make it look like a part of her real body.
Typically, people who need a nasal prosthesis undergo a procedure to reconstruct their nose when they are teenagers, when their face has stopped growing.
But Tessa’s parents, Grainne, 31, and Nathan Evans, 33, made the difficult decision for Tessa to undergo this new procedure to start creating a nose when she was still a toddler.
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They say they hope this will prevent more invasive surgeries in the future.
Mrs Evans, a mother-of-three, said: “It was an incredibly difficult decision for all of us, we loved Tessa very much and thought she was completely beautiful just the way she was.”
“In the end we decided to go ahead because it was an opportunity to gradually change her appearance over the years and normalize her profile without having to cut her face.”
“Normally the advice is to wait until adolescence, when the face has stopped growing, and build a nose using bone and skin grafts, which is quite a big task and leaves scars.”
This process is much less aggressive and Tessa’s nose will grow with her and she will avoid major surgery when she is older, she said.
She added: “As Tessa was the first patient to have this done, we had to put a lot of trust in her surgical team that we were making the right decision for Tessa’s future.
“But thanks to Tessa paving the way, another girl in the UK will have the same procedure in the coming months.”
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