When she was 9, Crystal Coombs was severely bit in the face by a dog her grandfather was holding. She blacked out, and when she came to, the emergency room doctors told her she needed a skin graft.
The plastic surgeons who operated on her chose to use tissue from her groin.
What they didn’t tell the star of the upcoming episode of “Botched” was that she’d begin to grow pubic hair out of said patch of skin, which lies right below her right eye and takes up the majority of her cheek.
Now a new mom, Crystal is seeking the help of Hollywood plastic surgeons Terry Dubrow and Paul Nassif, but the reason she’s doing so may surprise you.
“When I was 9 years old, my grandfather was holding the dog, and I was actually pretty terrified of the pitbull,” Crystal explained to the doctors in the preview above. “All I remember is black.”
“Full attack mode?” Dubrow asked. “So he bit out the chunk of tissue?” Nassif added, both doctors horrified by the situation.
“Clean,” Coombs confirmed. “Then went to the emergency room, and there the doctors suggested that we wait until we see a plastic surgeon.” When Dubrow asked how long her gaping wound was open, she couldn’t remember specifics — just that she was “open for a while.”
“[You know] how the outside of Freddy Krueger’s face looks, like with the burn?” she asked the doctors. “That’s what the inside looked like. So we went to the doctor. He suggested the skin graft. Take it from the groin…”
“So what happened?” interrupted Nassif, sitting on the edge of his seat. Embarrassed, she replied, “They did the surgery and then the hair started growing.”
“So you were getting pubic hair on your face?” Nassif asked to clarify he had understood correctly. “Yes,” Crystal lamented. “Literal pubic hair.”
“Crystal is very lucky that the emergency room physicians didn’t just try to stitch up that big gash and opening in her cheek because the ER doctor does not have the same skill set as a plastic surgeon,” Nassif later told the camera. “If they did, she would’ve been like this (see photo below).”
Dubrow found it “interesting” that the previous surgeon chose to take skin from the groin of all places. “They could’ve done the back, the abdomen,” he said, making sure to point out, “You obviously wouldn’t do the armpit.”
When Nassif asked how the skin graft had affected Coombs’ life, she admitted it hadn’t — until she became a mother.
“Now since having my daughter, I really started to get conscious of it,” she said, noting that her daughter, Sana, is now 6 months old. “I’m worried about the kids that she’ll go to school with.” Crystal said she was more worried about her daughter getting made fun of than she was about herself.
“After having my daughter, I am very nervous about how other kids will treat her because of how I look,” she explained. “I don’t want her to be teased.”
Dubrow said he and Nassif were “amazed that you can have that large a chunk taken out of an area where there are so many facial nerve branches,” noting that aside from the groin area the doctors chose to use, it was “expertly done reconstructive work.”
When Nassif asked Crystal what she wanted from them, she begged, “If we can make it as small and as minimal as possible, that would be perfect?”
Dubrow later explained to the camera that Crystal’s case is “actually very deceptively complicated” because “that skin graft is very close to critical anatomical structures like the nose, the cheeks and the eye, that if altered even a little bit can change the entire shape of the face and look very deformed.”
This episode of “Botched” airs Monday, January 6 on E!
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