How a balloon gave one man a new head of hair

An inflatable balloon has helped a 30-year-old man recover from 17 years of surgery which removed tumor tissue and almost ten inches of skin from his scalp.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Chris Stoyanov had a special bag inserted underneath his skin which was then slowly filled with 950 ml of fluid over six months until it stretched his scalp so there was enough skin to replace what he had lost.

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Stoyanov suffered from a tumor that appeared as a fatty cyst on the crown of his head when he was 13. Numerous surgeons in Bulgaria where unable to permanently remove it.

"After a few years, it just grew back again. I went back and forth from hospital," he said. "Surgeons would keep removing the tumor and the skin around it. They had to use skin grafts from my legs to cover the patches and my hair never grew back so I spent nearly seven years in baseball caps."

He finally moved to England in 2009 where he saw a London based specialist in 2011 who told him that if the tumor remained untreated it would eventually pierce his skull and possibly kill him.

"I had never thought it could be so dangerous and it was quite a shock when I was told what could happen if I just left the tumor to grow. I knew something had to be done."

Plastic surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick preformed the successful operation to insert the balloon which would allow for enough skin to form to cover Stoyanov's bald spot.

For six months Stoyanov had to be very careful as the balloon was inflated. "It was very uncomfortable and as it got bigger I had to be more and more careful that it didn't burst.

"It was a difficult six months but I managed to take things very slowly and carefully and it's proved a huge success."

After the six months the skin was taken and stapled into place over Stoyanov's bald spot and hair started to grow back in just a month. As an added bonus, Stoyanov will never go bald because the hair that is growing comes from the back of his head, an area that isn't affected by hair loss.

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