Badly Burned Girl Has Face Restored
June 23 -- At just 9 years old, Zubaida Hasan was severely burned. While lighting the family's kerosene cooking stove in August 2001, it burst into flames and set her on fire.
Without expert medical care — doctors are scarce in her remote region of Afghanistan — scar tissue fused Zubaida's face and one arm to her chest, leaving her horribly disfigured.
Smiling became impossible; the young girl could not even close her eyes. Her father brought her to a hospital in Iran, but after a 20-day stay, doctors told him there was little that they could do, and the only option was to let the girl die.
Instead, Zubaida's father brought her to a U.S. military base in Kabul for help. Overcoming numerous obstacles and with the help of Army doctors, the State Department, the Red Cross and the Children's Burn Foundation, she was ultimately brought to the United States.
Once in the States, Zubaida was treated beginning last June at the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where Dr. Peter Grossman and his medical team performed the first of a dozen complex surgeries.
A Horrific Disfigurement
"It was certainly one of the most horrific cases that we've seen, and very disturbing — that pulls on your heart strings," Grossman told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.
In the absence of any adequate treatment, the body tried to heal itself by growing scar tissue, he said. The scar tissue on Zubaida's face was pulling down to the scar tissue on her chest. And because the scar tissue does not have the elasticity of skin does, it was pulling on her mouth and eyelids. It took about six months for the full disfigurement to set in.
Yet there was still healthy tissue to work with, Grossman said. For the first surgery, doctors had to cut through deep layers of scar tissue to detach Zubaida's face from her chest. For the first time in more than a year, her face emerged.
"We squeezed about three years of surgery into one, because we had a goal of getting her back home within a year so she wouldn't be separated from her family," Grossman said.
