For about four years a lump in the lower jaw of a Senegalese teenager kept growing. By the time he reached Spain he was fifteen, the mass measured more than twenty centimetres, it had eaten two-thirds of the mandible and was pushing toward the base of the skull and the throat. Swallowing water and food had become a struggle. He arrived in Valencia almost starved.

The tumour was an ameloblastoma: a rare, usually benign growth that starts in the cells that form tooth enamel. It does not typically spread like a cancer, but it invades bone without mercy. Left alone it can close the airway or the gut. In Senegal there was no team equipped to cut it out and rebuild the jaw in the same sitting.

Asociación GUP, which works in Senegal, brought the case to Dr. Ignacio Solís, a maxillofacial surgeon at Hospital Vithas Valencia 9 de Octubre. Fundación Vithas and the hospital paid for the journey and the operating room. In a long operation Solís’s team removed the entire tumour and rebuilt the missing mandible with a free fibula flap — a length of bone from the lower leg, still attached to its own artery and vein, plumbed into the neck so the graft would live. Microvascular sutures held the blood supply. After months of recovery the boy could breathe, eat and smile. Photographs taken against a white background show the difference: a face pulled sideways by a globe of tissue, then a face that looks like a teenager again.

Spanish social posts often call him Aliou and credit Fundación Pedro Cavadas. Cavadas, also based in Valencia, has flown Africans with giant facial tumours for years and has removed ameloblastomas and neurofibromas the size of a head. The published hospital record of this particular Senegal case names Mamadou Seydou and Solís. The medicine is the same either way: radical resection plus living bone, or the tumour wins.

Ameloblastoma is uncommon; a neglected one that reaches the skull base in a child is rarer still. The operation does not invent a new technique. It applies a standard reconstruction to a patient who would otherwise have died of a “benign” lump because the plane ticket and the microscope were on another continent.

Sources

El Español and La Vanguardia reports on Mamadou Seydou at Hospital Vithas Valencia 9 de Octubre, 2023

Statements by Dr. Ignacio Solís and Asociación GUP director Raquel Peris

Fundación Vithas account of the fibula-flap reconstruction

Mayo Clinic overview of ameloblastoma and jaw reconstruction

El País and related coverage of Fundación Pedro Cavadas facial-tumour missions in Africa (context for Valencia humanitarian surgery)