Karissa Weckesser lost “part of her face” after a severe dog bite a year ago — but the botched surgery to repair her mouth was nearly as bad.
The 24-year-old was hanging out at her friend’s house when a dog bit her, and she immediately blacked out, waking up in the ER.
“I don’t remember anything,” Weckesser says in this exclusive clip from Wednesday’s episode of Botched.
Another friend of Weckesser’s, who was also there that day, says that she quickly jumped into action.
“I was in the bathroom when the bite actually happened,” she says. “So I go out there, and my friend’s face is missing, so I started flipping out. I called 911, and the ambulance came, they gave me the part of her face, and put it on ice in the ambulance. She didn’t pass out, but she was in shock.”
At the hospital, Weckesser’s friend handed the piece of her lip to the attending surgeon, but he was unable to use it.
“They had it on ice and the surgeon tried to replace it, but there was so much tissue damage and nerve damage that he couldn’t connect it,” Weckesser says. “He said it was dead tissue.”
Dr. Paul Nassif says that it looks like the surgeon instead took a skin graft.
“What they did is take a piece of your lower lip and rolled it up to fill that defect,” he explains. “Before doing an aggressive procedure like that, we would’ve maybe put the tissue together and see how it heals, because it does shorten, obviously, the sides of your mouth.”
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“That’s really a shame, because there’s a good chance that Karissa’s mouth could have looked a lot better if the doctors used original tissue,” Dr. Nassif adds.
Weckesser’s hope now is that the Botched doctors can shorten her lip, something that none of the doctors she has seen over the last year have been able to do.
“It’s really hard. I’m so young and I don’t want to look like this for the rest of my life, I don’t,” she says. “I can’t even really begin to express how I feel, because it’s been a very long journey for me.”
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