WASHINGTON, November 2 (RIA Novosti) – A Ukraine-born woman disfigured by radiation treatments after being misdiagnosed with cancer is set to receive $1 million worth of free facial reconstruction surgeries in the United States, The Louisville Courier-Journal has reported.
Lessya Kotelevskaya, who was born in Ukraine but moved to Kazakhstan in her childhood, was given mere months to live when doctors diagnosed a growth on her jaw as a malignant tumor. She was 19 at the time, the Courier-Journal reported.
In 2002, 40 sessions of intensive radiation treatments left Kotelevskaya with a hole in her face after which she found it difficult to find work and even to eat. Her husband left her in 2007, the same year she had a son.
Impoverished and socially ostracized, Kotelevskaya was eventually forced to live in the basement of a car wash, she told the Courier-Journal.
Last year she was tracked down via social media by her Kentucky-based cousin, Oleg Sennik, who had immigrated to the United States in 1996. Before bringing Kotelevskaya and her son to his home, Sennik took her to an oncologist in Kiev who told her she never had cancer.
Now Dr. Jarrod Little, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Louisville, and a local hospital have offered to donate more than $1 million in surgeries and care to reconstruct Kotelevskaya’s cheek, jaw and mouth, the Courier-Journal reported Wednesday.
Kotelevskaya told the paper that it was her greatest wish to have a normal face, to eat and live like everybody else.
