Putting a Smile on Her Face : Thanks to Successful Surgeries, 7-Year-Old Chelsey Thomas Realizes Her Lifelong Dream

Now, she needs braces. The little Palmdale girl who spent nearly eight years of her life without a smile because of a congenital birth defect, then underwent about 24 hours of painstaking plastic surgeries and three operations--one of which was aborted at the last minute because of a fever blister--to correct the condition, is finally able to visibly vent her joy, bliss, delight, jubilation and euphoria.

But now, her parents noticed that her teeth are crooked.

“Now that she can smile, you can really tell she needs braces,” Lori Thomas said.

“That’s the next step,” sighed Thomas, mother of 7-year-old Chelsey, who smiled the first full smile of her life about two days ago, roughly six weeks after completion of the second of two microvascular surgeries performed at a hospital in Woodland Hills.

The smile operations, conducted at Kaiser Permanente’s Woodland Hills Medical Center, were fully covered by the Thomases’ health insurance policy. The braces won’t come so cheaply.

But this week, when Chelsey looked in the mirror and realized that the upward tilt at both sides of her mouth represented something more than a simper, something stronger than a smirk, the braces didn’t seem like a big deal.

“I’m not looking forward to it,” admitted Chelsey, taking a break from playing with friends on Tuesday afternoon. “But I don’t mind going to the dentist.”

A trip to the orthodontist isn’t really that scary, said Chelsey, who’s had plenty of trips to doctors’ offices over the years. Chelsey was born with Moebius syndrome, a rare condition that impairs use of her facial muscles, causes hearing and speech problems and other medical difficulties.

And no dentist could dampen her spirits anyway--not now. She has just triumphantly achieved her dream of smiling before her eighth birthday, coming up on June 29.

That dream was jeopardized during her first scheduled surgery in November. With Chelsey already sedated and lying on the operating table, doctors noticed a fever blister on her lip. The virus might have threatened the health of a new muscle that surgeons planned to extract from Chelsey’s thigh and transplant into her cheek. Ultimately, doctors postponed the procedure, and Chelsey was briefly devastated.

But the next two operations, which each took about 12 hours to complete, were both successful. The transplanted thigh muscles were attached to what doctors hoped were healthy nerves in both cheeks in a complicated surgical procedure that required Canadian surgeon Dr. Ronald Zuker and Kaiser’s chief of plastic surgery, Dr. Avron Daniller, to use special microscopes.

But it was all worth it, Chelsey says. “I smile at my mom when I go to bed at night. I’m going to smile at everybody.”

On the day of her birthday, her parents and friends are planning a big “smile” party. Then, the folks from Disneyland will pick her up in a limo and fete her, her friends and family all day at the theme park.