WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (KCCI) — While waiting in a West Des Moines exam room, Mya Buie nervously applies her lip gloss. Three months ago, the 17-year-old had multiple surgeries to reconstruct her jaw. In this moment, she is waiting to be seen for a postoperative checkup. She hasn’t liked medical settings since a shooting landed her in a Des Moines hospital’s intensive care unit for several days.
“It was kind of scary. It was traumatic,” she said of the night her mother’s ex-boyfriend shot her in the face during a fight just days before her birthday.
On the other hand, her surgeon, Dr. Simon Wright, has been looking forward to this appointment all week. He calls Buie one of his most memorable and brave patients.
“I’m gonna take a look under your chin,” he says to Buie while carefully touching her face. The teenager was shot in the face with a .40-caliber bullet at close range. The impact of the bullet fractured and shattered her jaw into tiny fragments and permanently damaged four teeth.
For years, Wright, a facial reconstruction trauma surgeon, has reconstructed facial bones by bending and molding titanium plates by hand to the injured area. It’s a time-consuming and often erroneous process.
“There is always a level of dissatisfaction, and it doesn’t feel good to do something just good enough,” Wright said.
The manual work has now been replaced with modern technology. Doctors used artificial intelligence to read a CT scan of Buie’s jaw, then a 3D printer turned that image into a custom jawbone plate.
“It’s so much easier than trying to bend a plate to get it perfect,” Wright said. “It’s no question a game-changer.”
Doctors say a customized jawbone plate allows for a more accurate fit, better aligns the jaw with a patient’s teeth, and cuts surgery time in half. What makes this process so unique, Buie’s customized plate was made in record time, a first for Des Moines trauma surgeons.
“The ability to make a custom plate has been around for 10 years or more, but the ability to do it very quickly has not been,” Wright said.
What would normally take several weeks took only a few days. The plate was created in a lab in Jacksonville, Florida, put on a plane to the Des Moines International Airport, then hand-delivered to the hospital on a Friday night before the teenager’s surgery first thing Saturday morning.
“There is a lot of things that have to go right to do any kind of surgery at all, and to do something complicated like this, it’s really an inspiring thing to be part of,” Wright said, smiling. He also said this advancement serves as a reminder of the importance of supporting medical research because of its impact on people.
“This came from the efforts of all kinds of people in different fields that have cross-pollinated. For example, 3D printing as a medical application, and at one point, it may not have begun with a medical endpoint in mind,” he said.
For trauma patients, time is of the essence. For Buie, time does heal. The high school junior is back to school with plans to graduate early. Doctors expect her to make a full recovery. Her new jawbone plate will eventually fuse to bone and be as strong as ever.
“I just thank God every day for giving me a second chance at life. I’m very grateful. I can tell my story and spread the word of God with this story, like a testament.”
Buie will likely undergo additional surgeries. Next month, she will receive dental implants for her missing teeth.
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