Brown’s face surgery delayed
After a lifetime of being bullied and stared at, Christine Brown still manages to shrug off the setbacks.
The recipient of major face surgery this year, Brown was to have her final tidy-up surgery at Dunedin Hospital yesterday.
However, she said she was rung this week to say it was being canned because someone else needed to take her spot on the operating table.
She was not fazed, saying her final surgery was now likely to take place in February.
‘‘A person that needed it more than me took my place.
‘‘I am happy if someone needed it more,’’ she said.
She saw the positives in the delay: She would now get to spend Christmas day with her family without being in postsurgery pain, and she gets to spend a couple of days with her husband Lee Brown before Christmas.
‘‘We had already booked and paid for a motel and we couldn’t get a refund, so we decided we would still use it,’’ she said.
The couple have children and grandchildren, and it was the first time away by themselves since their two-day honeymoon in 1992, she said.
She was looking forward to getting the final surgery done after enduring a massive year.
Brown had a 16-hour face surgery in August, with surgeon Matthew Leaper labelling it a success.
However, she endured a couple of setbacks in following months, with part of her ear dying and kidney failure leaving her seriously ill for a short time.
Brown was born with neurofibromatosis, which causes multiple tumours to grow on nerves in her body, including her face.
When aged 7, a massive tumour dragging her face down was operated on for the first time, and she has endured 18 operations during her lifetime.
The first 17 were unsuccessful in aligning her face, but the 18th operation, in August, was different because bone was cut from her leg and moulded into a cheekbone which was screwed into her face using plates.
The cheekbone has given her face some support and structure.
Other work included lifting the right side of her face, recontouring her eye socket and taking fat from her tummy to fill a defect in her temple.
Her tidy-up surgery, perhaps in February, will including lifting the side of her mouth and fixing a hole in her ear drum.