SUNRISE, Fla. – A teenager who had been unwilling to leave her home in Haiti after a football-sized tumor enveloped her face went on a public shopping spree Wednesday.
“Thank you,” Marlie Casseus, 14, said with a smile to one woman who handed her $10 to buy batteries for her new portable CD player. With a pink cell phone clipped to her jeans, Marlie also filled up her shopping cart with DVDs, video games and new clothes.
Four surgeries this year at Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami removed the 16-pound tumor, recentered Marlie’s eyes, defined her nose, and implanted a synthetic skeleton made of hard polymer under her eyes to give her the contours of a normal cheekbone.
“She’s come a long way. She is happy,” her mother, Maleine Antoine, told another Wal-Mart shopper who stopped to congratulate Marlie on her first big shopping trip after undergoing reconstructive surgeries. The $1,400 shopping spree was funded by a Florida woman who read about Marlie’s medical saga.
The growth, first noticed when Marlie was 8, had choked off her ability to speak, crushed her airways and stretched her features so far apart that only her eyes, nostrils and a single tooth were recognizable. U.S. doctors have said she was near death when she arrived in Miami last year.
Now Marlie shows off her dance moves and her ability to sip water from a cup like anyone else. She has been in speech therapy since a tracheotomy tube was removed from her throat last month. She converses in Creole with her mother, but only the vowels in the words are clear – without teeth she cannot clearly enunciate consonants.
“For a long time, she’s never talked. I’m happy to hear her voice,” Antoine said.
The teen and her mother head home to Port-au-Prince on Saturday. Marlie will return to Miami in two years for additional surgeries on her nose and jaw and to receive dental implants, said Dr. Jesus Gomez, who has led Marlie’s surgical teams.
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