Brooklinn Khoury was 20 years old and had a budding career as a skateboarder and model when her cousin’s pit bull attacked her in Arizona.
It was November 3, 2020. The bite completely severed her upper lip and part of her nose: “everything from the nose down was torn off”, she said herself.
For a year, several doctors told her that her face would never be the same again. Her mother, Melissa Demenagos, refused to accept it and kept searching until she found Dr. Nicholas Do, a UCLA Health surgeon specializing in facial microsurgery.
What followed were five surgeries in 14 months. Do reconstructed her lip with skin taken from Brooklinn’s own wrist, restored her ability to breathe with a graft through her nose, and refined every detail until the final operation, in February 2023, which lasted nearly six hours.
Today, Brooklinn tattooed her new lip to match the color and shares every step of her story on social media, becoming a supportive voice for other people with facial differences, such as Paige Towers, who experienced a similar attack.
