GIRL LEARNING TO SMILE AGAIN: Surgeons were successful in removing a 16-pound growth from the face of a 14-year-old girl.

Publication: The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida) (via Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News)

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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Miami Herald

Byline: Elinor J. Brecher, The Miami Herald

Dec. 17--The plan had been to remove only part of the huge growth distending Marlie Casseus's upper face and leave the rest for future surgeries, but the operation went so well that doctors just kept going.

By the time they'd tied off the last of about 2,500 stitches just minutes before midnight Wednesday, surgeons at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center's Holtz Children's Hospital had opened the 14-year-old Haitian girl's face like a book and excised nine pounds of jelly-like fibrous tissue, bone fragments, teeth and fluid.

With titanium mesh, they'd constructed a new framework for her...

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