After a 19-year wait, Noor Khafaji will finally have both a great reason to smile — and the ability to flash a perfect one.
The Iraqi teen was born with a deformity that kept one side of her face from developing, leaving her with lopsided lips, a sunken right cheek, a drooping ear and a dent in her forehead.
A four-doctor team plans to change all that Monday with a series of life-altering surgeries at Lenox Hill Hospital.
“Always, I have been the girl who stays at home doing nothing,” she told the Daily News. “After the surgery, I will be the girl who does everything she wants. Goes shopping, goes to school. I will be more confident, I’ll smile without covering my face.”
Noor said she knows the eight-hour operation is dangerous and that she might need more surgery in a year. But she said, “I can’t stay like this.”
“I want everything done and when I look so pretty then I will go to college,” she said. “I will be so happy when this is done.”
Dr. Thomas Romo, one of the surgical quartet and Lenox Hill’s director of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, said getting Noor out of her war-torn country was almost as complicated as her upcoming treatment.
The girl was just 11 when a U.S. Army nurse based in Iraq referred her to him. But nothing could be done until the Baghdad resident finished growing and maturing, leaving Noor to awkwardly navigate her teen years with the congenital deformity.
“She has waited a long time,” Romo told the Daily News. “But I’ll tell you, she has such a wonderful attitude. She’s going to college. And she wears her hair like Lana Turner, pulled over to one side.”
Once Noor turned 19, arranging her trip to New York became another obstacle.
“With all the travails going on in the Middle East and Iraq, it was difficult to get visas, to get passports,” the doctor said. “And it took years to get her into this stable physical situation. With all that going on, we flew her from Baghdad to Istanbul and into JFK.”
She arrived with her mother in Gotham eight days before the scheduled surgery.
Thanks to the Little Baby Face Foundation, plus the generosity of the hospital and the doctors, the entire treatment is free.
The birth defect, known as hemifacial microsomia, will be reversed by six to eight hours of surgery on Monday. Even that will only be Step 1, as Romo says the work will be done in stages.
“It’s like half a face transplant,” Romo said.
Doctors will initially remove a flap of soft tissue and some bone from the girl’s leg to create the side of her face that never developed.
The complex procedure will require rebuilding the teen’s nose, ear, jawbone and cheekbone. She will remain in the city for followups through Sept. 3 with the help of the foundation — a group dedicated to free reconstructive surgery for indigent patients.
Noor is in good hands. Romo has 25 years of experience in this kind of reconstructive work.
Speaking through an interpreter, Noor’s mother, Shatha Hassan, said she is grateful to the foundation and especially to Romo.
“No one has ever cared like Dr. Romo,” she said. “As long as I’m alive, I’m going to pray for him. I’m so thankful to him and to everyone who has helped us make her smile.”
