If someone had told you that this was possible, you probably wouldn’t have believed it.
Plastic surgeons in El Paso grew an ear on a soldiers forearm and then later attached to his head to perform a complete ear surgery – complete in every way.
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It was two years ago that private Shamika Burrage nearly died after she met with an accident. She was driving back with her cousin to Texas from her native place Mississippi, when the tire blew out and her car went for a toss sending Burrage out of the car. Hours later when she woke up in hospital, her left ear had completely gone.
In performing this complex task, Doctors had kept the ear shaped tissue graft under her skin letting it form blood vessels before a transplantation surgery. Doctors harvested the cartilage from Burrage’s ribs which was then carved in to a new ear and placed under her forearm skin to grow, according to a statement from Army.
Plastic surgeons who pulled this medical miracle hoped that in five years, the ears won’t have a notable difference. “The whole goal is by the time she’s done with all this, it looks good, it’s sensate, and in five years if somebody doesn’t know her they won’t notice,” Lt. Col. Owen Johnson III, chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the medical center, said in the statement. “As a young active-duty Soldier, they deserve the best reconstruction they can get.”
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