Nagalem Haile grew up in a rural Ethiopian village with a venous vascular malformation that had turned her lower face into a heavy, thin-walled tangle of vessels. It sat on the jawbone. Speaking, swallowing and breathing were daily work. A fall or a nick could empty a child who had only about a litre of blood.

London teams who saw her around 2019 said they would not operate; the risk of fatal haemorrhage on the table was too high. They pointed toward New York. Charities and Northwell Health brought Nagalem and her father, Matios Alafa Haile, to Lenox Hill Hospital. Dr Milton Waner, who directs the Vascular Birthmark Institute there, and his wife, facial plastic surgeon Dr Teresa O, spent weeks mapping the mass.

In June 2021 they spent twelve hours peeling vessels off bone, millimetre by millimetre, without taking the facial nerve or flooding the field. Waner called it a twelve on a scale of ten. The hospital and the surgeons worked without charging the family. Part of the jaw had to be reconstructed. Facial muscles had been spared.

Press photographs afterward show a small girl whose cheek no longer hangs like a second head. Father and daughter went home to Ethiopia. The malformation was not cancer; it was architecture gone wrong—vessels that should have been pipes, not a sponge. Removing it is still one of the harder jobs in paediatric vascular surgery. This time the child left the room breathing on her own.

Sources

• TODAY / People / Medscape, July 2021: 12-hour resection at Lenox Hill, Dr Milton Waner and Dr Teresa O
• Northwell Health / Vascular Birthmark Institute of New York
• Father Matios Alafa Haile; rural Ethiopia; venous malformation involving the mandible