Delicate surgery gives 19-year-old back her stolen smile

The surgery to remove Caitlin Cowen’s tumor fixed her brain but stole her smile.


Doctors successfully removed a tumor located deep within the Louisiana teen’s brain stem back in 2008, right before her senior year of high school. But during the procedure, brain regions that controlled the left side of Caitlin’s body and the right side of her face were damaged.
When the 17-year-old felt well enough to look at herself in the mirror, she quickly realized that she had no control over the right side of her mouth. No matter what she did, the corner just drooped. She couldn't smile.
“It was a big shocker,” Caitlin told TODAY.com. “I felt like I lost my whole face.”
She also was left with double vision and a long struggle to learn to walk again. But the loss of her smile was especially hard for Caitlin, a quiet but social teen, now 19 and a sophomore at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La.
On bid day for her sorority, she cried because she thought she looked mad amid all the other young women who were beaming with smiles and laughter.
Caitlin’s dad, a physician who rehabs brain-injured patients, was sure there had to be a way to help his daughter. After combing through the medical literature and reaching out to experts, Todd Cowen found someone who might be able to help her: Dr. Tessa Hadlock, a Boston facial nerve surgeon who for years has been successfully bringing back smiles to kids who suffered partial facial paralysis either through a birth defect, from an accident, or from a procedure like Caitlin’s.

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