Katie Piper, the British model and tv personality who was attacked with skin-melting acid back in 2008, is learning to love her face again! And who wouldn’t love that face??
In 2008, Katie met a man named Daniel Lynch. They dated for a few weeks before Daniel held her prisoner in a hotel room. There he raped and beat poor Katie, stabbing her several times in the arm. Eight hours later they drove back to her apartment. She went to the hospital to treat he wounds but kept the situation secret in fear of Daniel.
After the incident, Daniel left numerous apologies on her voicemail and finally persuaded her to go to an internet cafe to read an email he sent her. When she was approaching the cafe, Daniel’s accomplice, Stefan Sylvestre walked up to her and threw the acid all over her face.
The results were terrifying. The doctors had to remove all of the skin. Fortunately, the attack was caught on camera and both men are jailed.
After many, many surgeries and therapy sessions, Katie has found hope three years after the vicious attack that changed her life forever. She’s even releasing her diary entries in hopes of inspiring others.
In some passages, she explains :
My hair started to fall out through malnutrition, my periods stopped and I was fitting into children’s clothes. I had to wear a special rigid plastic mask over my entire face 23 out of 24 hours a day to compress my skin and stop the developing scar tissue turning thick and lumpy,. It was hot, sore and uncomfortable, but I put up with it, knowing it might one day give me some sense of normality back.
Permanent make-up tattooed on my eyebrows and lip line made me feel so much more confident about my face, but the real achievement that night [when she was honored at Daily Mail‘s Inspirational Women Awards] was that I was no longer scared to step out of the door — it felt like I had my life back.
I am a completely different person now, both on the outside and inside. But my journey is still not over, I have more surgery planned; my next operation will be to rebuild the rims of my nostrils and give me a septum, using cartilage from my ears. It will be a long time before I’m finally free of the surgeon’s knife. But I have learned to love my face again, something I once thought impossible.
You are such an inspiration, Katie! You are truly beautiful, inside and out. Sending you all our love!!
[Image via AP Images.]