"Pay attention to how my face gradually starts looking better."
Pro skateboarder Brooklinn Khoury is clearly very happy with the results of her six lip reconstruction surgeries since being attacked by a pit bull in 2020.
The 23-year-old athlete has been highlighting her progress on both Instagram and TikTok, sharing a video to the latter this week in which she responded to a fan who noticed her scars were barely visible.
"This is exactly what my surgeon was trying to do: hide my scars in my smile line, it's brilliant," said Khoury. "Look at these photos from after every surgery, pay attention to how my face gradually starts looking better," she added, alongside a series of pictures showing how far she's come since the initial attack.
In another video from January, a fan wondered if she could just "stitch your lip back on" after the incident.
"I wish they were able to but unfortunately, when my lip flung of my face, it had been off of ice for at least two hours," she explained.
"When I got to the emergency room, they put it on ice in the corner. I was definitely hoping they would stitch it back on, but it had been off of ice for way too long and they decided to stich me up and in a couple days they sent me home."
She also opened up about how many surgeries she's had so far and what each one has been focused on.
"When I got attacked November 3, 2020, I obviously went to the hospital. The first surgery I had was just sewing everything up because the whole upper lip had been ripped off and all of it was exposed," she said. "It took me a year to find a doctor, when I finally found a surgery, I went into surgery November 17 of 2021. That was the surgery where they put my arm skin, attached it here and then funneled a main artery under my skin to I can feel my lip."
"All the surgeries after that have been making lip aesthetic," she added. "There's so many parts to a lip, my doctor's just trying to make it as close as I had it before."
She also recently revealed her next surgery will focus on giving her lips more shape, including a Cupid's Bow and central columns.
Khoury has been chronicling her progress on Instagram as well, sharing another series of images in mid-December while looking back at her journey so far.
Alongside the photos, she first shared a quote she wrote just a few months after the attack.
"I don't expect anyone to understand because how could you. I don't know how to explain the way that I feel when I look in the mirror," she felt at the time. "It's as if I’m a stranger, embodied in someone I've known before. She's somewhat familiar, but carries herself differently. I look up at myself and I see someone who has been patched up, to cover a mistake that should never have happened. I see someone who's exhausted from having to explain herself, to a society that's infatuated by perfection. She is someone who's trying to love what she sees but she's scared of what she is seeing."
Reflecting on that comment, she added, "When I got into the attack it was so hard to see what the future held for me. Thank God for giving me the strength, and the people I have in my life to help me grow, and continue to trust the process."
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