KANSAS CITY, Mo. (WDAF) – Jade Metivier was only 13 when she went through three surgeries that lasted 13 hours each.
Her diagnosis of Midface Hypoplasia meant that the bones in the middle of her face didn’t grow as fast as her chin and forehead.
“I could feel that people were confused when they looked at me, and I just kind of felt uncomfortable in a way,” she said.
She had trouble breathing, eating and even speaking to her friends.
“It was also hard just talking to them too, because I would say something and they just wouldn’t understand me no matter how hard I would try.”
When they found the right surgeon at New York Presbyterian, her parents, Mark and Christi Metivier, were nervous about the treatment plan.
“Understanding what she was going to go through, we actually had second thoughts about whether to put her through that,” her dad Mark said.
“I mean, it was scary.”
The surgery that Dr. Thomas Imahiyerobo proposed was traumatic and invasive but would reconstruct Jade’s facial bones.
“It was super scary when you’re told you’re going to cut your head from here to here, take your face off, put some hardware in your skull,” mom Christi said.
“It was a lot, but I think we just knew deep down that it had to be done. It had to be done.”
Jade said she didn’t know how extensive the surgeries were and was glad not to have known.
“I was scared and excited at the same time because I was excited that I could change my face,” she said.
“But the more I kept on asking my parents questions, the more the answers became scary.”
Jade had to be kept in a coma for up to four days while the swelling went down in her face. Her parents played Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” when something surprising happened.
“Lo and behold, she starts moving her hands to the music. She starts moving her hips to the music,” Mark said.
“And we called in the ICU nurses, and they were just amazed! They brought in all the nurses from the floor, they were bringing in doctors. They were yelling, ‘This is unbelievable!’”
Jade says that she doesn’t remember a thing.
“I was starting to wonder, like, how? But I was kind of surprised myself, because all I remembered was just going through a dance in my head,” she said.
Now 16 years old, Jade is a sophomore in high school. She’s learning to tap dance for the school musical and says she wants to study biochemical engineering.
“I’m a lot more confident in myself, and I look at people in the hallways and I just smile at them because I just love to be myself!”
Her parents say that while the journey was difficult, seeing her beautiful smile is all worth it.
“It took us about six or seven months, and all of a sudden we saw her again, like just her spark and her fire, her determination,” Chrisi said.
“From Day 1, she was determined to go to school, to be normal and go back to dancing.”