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Woman stays awake for 'life-changing moment'
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-02 08:57 SYDNEY: Australian Hajnal Ban asked doctors to keep her conscious as they broke her legs and attached them to stretching frames because she wanted to remember it as the moment that changed her life.
For as long as she could remember the 31-year-old lawyer and politician had felt deeply insecure about her height, but had resigned herself to life at 1.54 meters. "If you're not happy with the other parts of your body you can change them through fairly routine cosmetic surgery but this is something that couldn't be fixed," Ban said. "For a long time I thought nothing could be done." It was a chance conversation with friends as a 23-year-old that first alerted Ban to the concept of limb lengthening - a cosmetic procedure popular in China, Italy and the United States but little-known in Australia. "My ears just pricked up and I thought 'wow, this is incredible'," Ban said. After months of standing in front of the mirror on top of phone books the Israel-born Ban said she saved enough for the $30,000 operation and traveled to the Ilizarov clinic at Kurgan, in the Siberian depths of Russia. Doctors fed 14 wires through the flesh, soft tissue, muscle and bone of both legs to suspend them in circular stretching frames, and then broke them in two places. "I had an epidural so I was awake for the whole thing, it was a four-hour operation," Ban said.
"I was laying there and I recall quite vividly thinking this is just great, I'm finally here, I'm getting this done and it's going to change my life forever." Over the next nine months Ban's legs were stretched every day as the broken bones healed, eventually boosting her to a height of 1.62 meters. Once the frames were removed Ban spent another three months with both legs in plaster, and it was a "good solid year," she said, before she was "back to wearing heels and back to normal life". Now a qualified barrister with two university degrees, Ban was elected to Queensland state's Logan City Council in 2006 and made a failed bid for Australian parliament in 2007. Following the operation, Ban said her height insecurity "just seemed to vanish" and she had a new confidence in her professional credibility. "But I guess had I not had this operation I probably wouldn't be insecure about my height at this age because I would just accept who I am," she conceded. "As you get older as a woman I think you become more mellow and you become more comfortable in your own skin." AFP |
