A California model who was once featured in Vogue has opened up about the terrifying moment a pit bull bit off her top lip.
Brooklinn Khoury, 24, said that she still doesn’t know what set the dog off when it attacked her in November 2020.
The model and skateboarder was visiting her cousin in Arizona. At the time her biggest concern was a zit on her upper lip that she was cropping out of selfies she sent to friends.
But that all changed when the pit bull – a dog she had known for years – pounced on her face and clamped its sharp teeth on her upper lip, holding on to her for nearly a minute.
When the 100-pound dog finally opened its mouth, Khoury said she saw ‘something fly on the wall and then fall to the floor.’
‘It didn’t really hit that that was my lip. I couldn’t process that,’ Khoury told CBS.
For several minutes, she didn’t realize the extent of her injuries, and she opened her phone’s selfie camera confirm that she only had a deep cut.
But instead she discovered that ‘everything from the nose down was completely ripped off.’
The model was rushed to a hospital where she ended up sitting alone for several hours because of coronavirus constraints.
During this time, she desperately searched social media to see if there were other people out there with her injury, but she did so in vain.
‘I couldn’t find anybody that had no upper lip and was sharing a story or sharing a problem. I don’t want anyone to feel how I felt in that moment, which was just alone and very secluded.
‘I picked up my phone and just started recording everything.’
She snapped up pictures of her grievous injury and documented the hours she spent in the hospital.
Khoury hoped that the plastic surgeon would be able to reattach her top lip, but she soon discovered that it was impossible.
Instead, the doctor sewed up the injury and the skin from inside her mouth was flipped to the outside to seal the wound.
After the surgery was finished, Khoury was left without an upper lip, as well as pervasive scarring. Even when her mouth was shut, her teeth remained visible.
Although her new appearance was jarring, she decided to share pictures of herself on social media in a bid to share her story.
‘I genuinely wanted to share my story. I felt so alone in the hospital… I needed a community of difference in a world of perfect.
‘So I just made sure to be super vulnerable and have it be a safe space to post what I wanted to post. I just wanted somebody else, if they were going through it, to be able to relate.’
Not wanting to ‘rock no lip’ for the rest of her life, Khoury later resolved to find someone who could restore her smile.
She searched for a doctor for more than a year before finally finding someone suitable.
The doctor took a patch of skin from her wrist and grafted it to her top lip in a procedure which cost her a whopping $400,000.
She described the process as, ‘debulking and shaping and creating.’
Her doctor described the surgeries as an ‘art project’ because he was ‘molding and moving’ the piece around her face to ‘form the skin.’
Brooklinn admitted that the surgery helped her ‘eating process’ and her ‘communication.’
Not only did she begin to heal physically but emotionally as well, thanks to the support in her life from her loved ones.
The response that she received after candidly sharing her journey online has ‘helped so much’ because she learned that she is ‘not the only one that is going through something similar.’
On her Instagram, Khoury has created a safe space in which people like her can swap similar stories of reconstructive surgeries. It’s the kind of community she desperately searched for while waiting in the hospital after the attack.
‘I can’t even believe how many people have shared their stories with me. It’s been such a beautiful experience. I felt so alone, and now I have such a beautiful community of people.
‘I felt so alone in the beginning, and now I have so many people sharing their stories.’