Doctors can undertake botched surgeries which affect the self-confidence of their victims. Some deal with the scar or disfigurement by becoming introverted, others just become reclusive.
For a mother, Crystal Coombs, however, she wasn’t bothered much about her face after plastic surgeons who operated on her chose to use tissue from her groin when she was severely bitten in the face by a dog. The dog biting incident happened when she was nine.
While a young Coombs was content that the gaping hole in her face right below her right eye had been patched up, an adult Coombs is finding out that pubic hair is growing at the spot where skin was taken from her groin.
And in an episode of “Botched”, the new mom is seeking the help of Hollywood plastic surgeons Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif because she is concerned her child will be the butt of jokes from fellow pupils because of her unusual hair growth.
“When I was nine years old, my grandfather was holding the dog, and I was actually pretty terrified of the pitbull,” Crystal explained to the doctors in the preview above. “All I remember is black.”
“Full attack mode?” Dubrow asked. “So he bit out the chunk of tissue?” Nassif added, both doctors horrified by the situation.
“[You know] how the outside of Freddy Krueger’s face looks, like with the burn?” she asked the doctors. “That’s what the inside looked like. So we went to the doctor. He suggested the skin graft. Take it from the groin…”
“So you were getting pubic hair on your face?” Nassif asked to clarify he had understood correctly. “Yes,” Crystal lamented. “Literal pubic hair.”
When Nassif asked how the skin graft had affected Coombs’ life, she admitted it hadn’t — until she became a mother.
“Now since having my daughter, I really started to get conscious of it,” she said, noting that her daughter, Sana, is now six months old. “I’m worried about the kids that she’ll go to school with.” Crystal said she was more worried about her daughter being teased at school.
“After having my daughter, I am very nervous about how other kids will treat her because of how I look,” she explained. “I don’t want her to be teased.”
Dubrow said except for taking skin from the groin instead of from the back or abdomen, acknowledged her surgery was “expertly done reconstructive work.”
Coombs has a wish though: “If we can make it as small and as minimal as possible, that would be perfect?“
Dubrow later explained to the camera that Coombs’ case 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.”