A five-year-old girl who suffered injuries on her eyelids and whose face was badly distorted following an accident in December is now waiting to go back to school after undergoing facial reconstruction surgery.
The girl, from Giridih in Jharkhand, was riding pillion on her grandfather’s two-wheeler when a car hit the vehicle on its side on December 25.
The girl fell and suffered injuries on her face.
“We took her to a nearby hospital and then to a hospital in Dhanbad. From there, we brought her to Kolkata,” said the child’s father, Vikas Gupta.
She was brought to Medica Superspecialty Hospital at 12.30am on December 26 last year. She underwent surgery from 3am to 5am.
Akhilesh Kumar Agarwal, a consultant plastic surgeon at Medica, said that the upper and lower eyelids of the girl’s right eye had torn from the eye socket.
“She could have gone blind or there could have been an asymmetry in the right eye compared to her left eye,” Agarwal said.
The timely surgery prevented the damage to the eye, he said.
The skin on the girl’s forehead and nose was also torn apart.
Agarwal said the skin
was reconstructed and repaired in the surgery, without which the skin would
have sagged down, like what
is seen in some elderly persons.
The child’s nasal passage, that had also suffered in-
juries, was repaired. This allowed the girl to breathe properly.
Gupta said his daughter was now keen to join school. The doctors have given the green signal.
