Inside Duke Medicine
Media Spotlight: News & Observer features a 14-year-old girl who received a new silicone ear
posted December 7th, 2010
PHOTOS BY CHUCK LIDDY Elise looks warily at her ear after she attaches it herself for the first time in front of a mirror.
By Sarah Avery - Staff Writer, The News & Observer
DURHAM -- Shy and agreeable, laughing yet not joking, Elise Lutz was a beautiful girl who had learned to hide a part of herself.
Born in China 14 years ago and adopted by a Wake Forest family when she was 9, Elise was badly burned as a toddler. Doctors can only guess that a boiling cauldron tipped over on her.
The accident left scars and melted her right ear into a clump of flesh, although her hearing remained intact. Elise covered the flaw under silky black hair, combed and pinned precisely so.
Hair was an unreliable disguise, but other solutions were worse.
A glue-on prosthetic fit so poorly it drew attention to what she hoped to hide. Plastic surgery failed, the whorls and curves of ears being notoriously difficult for even the most skilled surgeons to sculpt.
What Elise wanted, simply, was more than cosmetic. She yearned to let her hair fall as it may. She wanted that carefree part of herself restored.
And so on a Wednesday in June, she headed into an operating room at Duke University Medical Center to have a plastic surgeon cut off all that remained of her mangled ear and another doctor implant titanium bolts into her skull that would eventually hold a new ear.
A silicone ear. A Hollywood special effect.