Mel Frisby jumped off a boat in Turkey and, when she surfaced, noticed that her nose was bleeding. It was September 2022, and she was on holiday with her 17-year-old son.
When she got home, a small lump appeared in the upper-left corner of her nose, right where she had “bone”. At the emergency department at Leeds General Hospital, nine days later, she was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone in the bridge of the nose, and underwent surgery to drain it. But her nose continued to swell and turn red. A CT scan revealed a soft-tissue mass, and a biopsy confirmed on November 7 that she had sinonasal squamous cell carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that originates in the nasal cavity and paranasal sinuses.
Three weeks later, surgeons removed most of her nose, although they managed to preserve her nostrils. A week later, they rebuilt it using cartilage from her ribs and skin from her forehead, sculpting a new nose over four weeks. “I looked like a monster”, she recalls of waking up. Then came 30 sessions of radiotherapy, and the radiation damaged the grafts: her nose collapsed. Today she is cancer-free, but the hospital told her there was nothing more they could do for her face.
