Girl Born w/ Terrible Birth Defect. Look at Her Face Now on Her Wedding Day!
Birth defects have to be one of an expecting parent’s worst nightmares. After all, there’s no way to tell if a young life is developing normally apart from various technical tests, and even those don’t always provide as clear of a picture as we would like.
For Corby, England, residents Tony and Theresa Hall, the birth of their daughter Cody must’ve seemed like both a dream come true and a nightmare.
The little baby emerged from with womb with an engaged curiosity and was mostly healthy — mostly.
But the parts of her that hadn’t fully formed correctly were on display for all to see. Poor Cody suffered from a hemangioma under her left eye, a condition that causes stem cells to become benign tumors.
In Cody’s case, her hemangioma swelled to engulf the entirety of the left side of her face, swelling the the tissue to twice its natural size and twisting her mouth and nose.
At one point, it nearly swelled her left eye shut.
“In England, our neighbor asked my wife if we put a bag over [Cody’s] head when we took her out,” Tony told the Orlando Sentinel. “The hardest thing is the stares and comments from the ignorant people in this world who don’t understand what’s going on with her.”
U.K. physicians were unable to help the little girl, so the Halls traveled to the United States. There they found Atherton, California, plastic surgeon Dr. David Apfelberg who excised Cody’s growth with multiple laser treatments.
However, those treatments left her with extensive scarring, which was when they sought out Dr. Milton Waner of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.
“She had extensive tissue destruction, and we performed several procedures to restore her face back to normalcy,” Waner explained to Fox News.
All in all, Cody underwent 18 operations over the space of 14 years. It was an expensive proposition, but the Hall family had help from kind strangers.
The Halls started a fundraising campaign and received an amazing £230,000 ($376,000) over the years. Even better was the end result, which was worth the cost.
“She looks much, much better now,” Waner said. “If you saw her walking on the street, you would never know she had had any problems.”
He wasn’t kidding. Cody caught the eye of one Lewis Holt and married him on November 10, 2017.
“It was an emotional day and there were some tears, especially when I saw Lewis at the altar, but only tears of joy,” she said in an interview with The Sun.
“I just want to show people that there is a happy ending.”
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