Late one night in 2016, after an argument with her then-boyfriend, Pamela found herself at the mercy of his pit bull, which bit her right ear and wouldn’t let go, despite her ex’s attempts to intervene.

By the time she got the dog off her, the entire ear was ripped off.
“There was nothing there. Absolutely nothing there,” says the 30-year-old finance worker from Elmhurst, Queens, who withheld her last name for professional reasons.

For Pamela, the yearslong process to rebuild her ear wasn’t just excruciatingly painful — “there were 11 surgeries, I think. I lost track after the eighth one” — it was a struggle toward getting back an important part of her identity.

“It’s a cultural thing,” she says. “Most Latina women get their ears pierced when they’re really young. So all my life, all I knew was ears and earrings just go together.”

But on Jan. 28, she finally got that part of her old self back — when Dr. Roberto Flores pierced a shimmering stud through the lobe he meticulously rebuilt with the help of new 3D-printing technology.

“This is the final part: having an ear with an earlobe that you can actually put an earring through,” says Flores, a plastic surgeon at NYU Langone Health.

The starting line was one that’s still hard for Pam to talk about. After the attack, the accumulated blood and tissue left her temporarily deaf in that ear. But she didn’t know who could rebuild it.

Enter Flores, who’s reconstructed more than a dozen ears in his career. But unlike Pam, his previous patients were either born without an ear or had underdeveloped ones, a rare condition called microtia. Pam’s was the first ear he had to rebuild after a traumatic injury.

To do it, he used an innovative new technique: By 3D printing a model of her healthy ear, he was able to “whittle and form” a nearly identical structure using cartilage from her ribs, then covering it with skin grafted from her arm.

“You’re basically using classic sculpting techniques,” says Flores, who sculpts in his spare time. “But her entire ear is made from her.”

He says the idea came to him about three years ago, when he was teaching his residents how to construct an ear the old way: “The doctor draws it by hand on a flat piece of plastic and essentially has a stencil. It’s pretty rudimentary.”

Flores, who works on a bioengineering research team, found his 3D-printing technique not only effective but inexpensive. Since he used the machines the medical center already had, the replica cost “under a dollar,” he says, as opposed to about $3,000 for contracting the model out to a manufacturing company.

While the reconstruction was painful, Pam says she always knew that it was a step toward getting back to the way things were before the horrifying attack. If her new ear heals correctly, she’ll be able to wear her favorite Tiffany earrings to her 31st birthday party this month.

“I’ll finally be back to myself,” she says. “It’s the true finish line.”

Source: https://earringsmarket.com/womans-ear-reconstructed-using-3d-printing-technology-after-pit-bull-attack/
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