She Had to Push the Lump Aside to See. Then Australia Took It Off.

Angel Salon was born in a Philippine public hospital and did not cry.

Doctors rushed her away. Days later her mother, Cypres, learned why. Angel had a frontal encephalocele: the skull and the membranes around the brain had not closed in the womb. Tissue and cerebrospinal fluid had pushed forward into a mass between her eyes. It blocked her view. Other children stared. Some were cruel. The family kept her close to home.

At four months, Cypres and her husband, Dale, raised about $5,500 for an operation in the Philippines that sealed the hernia off from living brain. The bulge remained. It still covered much of her left eye. She learned to shove it aside to play.

Complex reconstruction was out of reach at home. Cypres wrote to hospitals after reading about another Filipino child treated abroad. Interplast — volunteer surgeons from Australia and New Zealand — took the case. The Children First Foundation flew Angel and her father to Adelaide. In September 2016, at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital craniofacial unit, surgeon Walter Flapper and his team operated for about four hours. They removed a 200-gram lesion of abnormal tissue and fluid, then used bone from Angel’s hip to close the hole in her forehead so the hernia would not return.

She could see. She would need more work later to refine her nose. What changed immediately was the face in the mirror and the way a room looked when she entered it.

Cypres had spent years blaming herself for a defect no parent causes. The flight did not rewrite that first silent delivery. It gave a four-year-old a face the world would meet without flinching — and a mother the sentence she had been waiting to hear from her daughter: I have my new face.

Sources

The Age, “Angel’s new face” (interactive feature), 2016. https://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/angels-new-face/
Daily Mail Australia reporting on Angel Salon’s Adelaide surgery, November 2016
Children First Foundation / Interplast contemporaneous accounts of the transfer and four-hour reconstruction by Dr. Walter Flapper