‘My jaw stopped growing after a bike accident when I was 10’

When Alana Brownie was 10, a horrific bike accident stopped her jaw from growing.

While the rest of her face and body developed normally, and despite turning 40 this year, her jaw remained child-like.

“When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. “I just looked at other people and thought ‘why can’t I be like them?'”.

But now, a rare type of reconstructive surgery has “transformed her life”.

The mother-of-three from Aberdeenshire said her condition had impacted all aspects of her life and the new surgery was more than “just cosmetic”.

“It’s affected me severely through 25 years of not knowing who I was as a person to my quality of life and the pain that I had daily,” she said.

Alana waited six years for surgery in Glasgow with Moorthy Halsnad, a consultant maxillofacial surgeon who specialises in facial plastic surgeries.

He is the only surgeon in Scotland who combines this type of jaw surgery with reconstructive surgery that can give patients an adult face.

Alana’s condition is called idiopathic condylar resorption and it almost exclusively affects women.

It stops the lower jaw maturing and can be caused by arthritis or serious trauma in childhood.

Mr Halsnad said he only operates on roughly five cases here each year.

He said it had been a “very tortuous route” for Alana because of long waiting times and the failure of the previous operations.

Alana’s life changed when she fell off her bicycle as a child and fractured both sides of the growth plates on her jaw.

She has had five failed operations to try to fix it.

It has caused issues with eating and she suffers from nerve pain.

Alana has been in and out of hospitals all her adult life and said her mental health had suffered.

She said: “Every surgery my face has changed but it’s never stayed that way.”

Alana’s surgery in Glasgow required incisions on the side of her face, the removal of all plates and repositioning of her upper jaw.

She said she found it “extremely emotionally, mentally and physically hard”.

The surgery lasted 12 hours and included the unusual step of putting in an artificial titanium joint in an attempt to make this surgery last by going back to the foundations and building up the jaw.

The Queen Elizabeth University Hospital is one of the specialist centres for joint replacement surgeries.

It comes with major risks including the possibility of becoming paralysed on her face.

However, Mr Halsnad believes this is life-changing surgery because his patients suffer mental health issues and a lack of confidence because of having a child-like face.

“We are living in the world where appearance make a quite a significant impact, especially between their prime time in their life,” he said.

For the first six weeks after surgery Alana was numb and on a liquid diet as she was not allowed to chew.

The swelling takes even longer to go down, with recovery taking between six months to a year.

Mr Halsnad said he was happy with the complicated surgery and everything went safely without causing nerve damage in a so-called “spaghetti junction” of structures.

Despite the pain Alana is “ecstatic” with the results.

Even her auntie did not recognise her when they bumped into each other during a school run.

Alana said, “I’ve just had days that I would just cry and cry and then I would look in the mirror and I would cry and cry.

“Not in a bad way, but I think it’s all just been built up emotion and having something that’s been weighing on your shoulders for so long and I just feel relief that now this is who I’m meant to be.”

Before the latest surgery, Alana said she would never tie her hair up as she hid behind it and had pain and could not open her mouth for long periods of time.

“If I was to chew a steak or something then I would have grinding and a gristling noise in my joints and things like that,” she said.

“I was maybe just used to having that pain there all the time.

“Now that I’ve got my new prosthetic joints I don’t have that same pain.

“I am only six weeks post-op and it has already transformed my life.”