12-year-old Indian boy gets new nose grown on forehead

To save a limb, some surgeons are willing to use unorthodox methods like the Brazilian surgeon who implanted the severed hand in the stomach of a factory worker temporarily. In India, a surgeon grew the nose of a baby on his forehead and later successfully transferred the body part to its proper place.

BBC reports that as an infant, the nose of Indian boy Arun Patel was badly damaged and disfigured by pneumonia when infection destroyed the cartilage. Treatment made by doctors at Madhya Pradesh Village, the side effect of an injection, eventually damaged the child’s nose.

However, after a decade, Arun has a new nose through a pre-fabricated forehead flap rhinoplasty performed by Dr Ashwini Dash who led the surgical team, reports Inquisitr. The four-phased procedure began with doctors infusing a special silicon tissue expander into the boy’s forehead which forces the skin and tissue to grow more than it should.

Doctors also injected the expander with a special chemical. Then as the second phase, they took from the lower part of Arun’s chest a cartilage to create a new nose and attached it to the growth on the forehead, together with the skin and tissue.

Although growing the nose on forehead gave the child temporarily an odd appearance, doctors explain that the good blood supply on that area helped the tissue grow healthily. The surgeon then removed the artificially sculpted nose from the forehead and grafted it between the eyes and the mouth and covered the area on Arun’s forehead.

Besides having a new nose, Arun is doubly blessed because the doctors performed the surgery for free since the child’s family is very poor. It is the second time the rare surgery was done, the first was in China in 2013 on a man whose nose was damaged in a traffic accident.

Arun admits that while the nose was still growing on his forehead, he was afraid to see himself in the mirror and walked in public with his head down. At school, some of the students either teased or feared him. But with his new nose, Arun said he also got a new life and “now I can face the people with head held high.”

VIDEO: Doctors in India Grow New Nose on Boy’s Forehead