Teenager Alanna Quinn Idris faces a month-long recovery after undergoing her first reconstructive surgery to repair her eye socket and cheekbone.
The 17-year-old suffered serious facial injuries in an alleged assault on December 30 including a ruptured eyeball, broken cheekbone and a shattered tooth.
Her mum Jamie told the Irish Sunday Mirror how the teen spent four nights in Dublin’s St James’s Hospital this week but is now home recovering following a lengthy surgery on Tuesday.
She said: “It went pretty well from the surgeon’s point of view. They did mention that her eyeball is atrophied so I guess that means that it has degenerated.
“But we are just hopeful that she keeps the eye. Even without the sight, just for her to have her own eye.
“The surgeons said that the recovery would take about a month so I was expecting her to be worse when I went to the hospital to see her.
“Her face is swollen and bruised but she’s not too bad now, she’s on strong painkillers.”
Jamie said the surgeons managed to fix a number of Alanna’s injuries.
She revealed: “They repaired the eye socket and the cheekbone.
“They took bone from her hip and they basically rebuilt her eye socket and her cheekbone.
“They were talking about having to maybe put a plate in but they didn’t luckily, they just used screws.
“They have kind of concluded that she is definitely not going to see again.
“Even now that her eyeball is in the right place, where it is supposed to be, when she pulls open her eyelid her eye looks inwards towards her nose.
“They had suggested just for cosmetic purposes cosmetic lenses maybe if the eyeball didn’t look normal.
“I really don’t want her to go down the road of prosthesis but every time we were with the surgeon he said they’re trying to get the eyeball to the correct size and shape for a prosthetic.”
Jamie praised her daughter for her strength and resilience throughout the whole ordeal.
She went on: “Alanna is very strong, I don’t know how or where she gets it from. She’s very resilient.”
Jamie also told how online trolls have started targeting Alanna in recent weeks by setting up fake accounts and saying nasty things about her.
She said: “There are some people, who I guess you would call trolls, making up fake pages and just putting comments up.
“There was one the other day that just made me so angry which said ‘Oh look at Mother Teresa pretending to be nice and not rude’.
“People have been horrible to her and have been for years. There have been a few comments about her appearance too. Some people do make stupid comments.”
Jamie also revealed how people have started to stare at Alanna and her injuries which is causing her daughter a lot of distress.
She continued: “One thing that is really bothering her is when we go out anywhere, people are literally staring at her. It’s so uncomfortable for her.
“It’s not even that they are having a quick look and like ‘Oh it’s that girl’, they are literally standing and staring at her face.
“I’m even getting uncomfortable with it.”
Jamie said she is still looking to relocate from her home Ballyfermot in Dublin as she no longer feels safe in the area.
She said: “I still want to move out of here.
“My poor kids have not been in the playground since Christmas.
“I’m afraid to let them out.”
But on a positive note, when it comes to what plans Alanna has for the future, Jamie said she would love to travel and then carve out a career as an interior designer.
She said: “She wants to be an interior designer after school. She had said that she wants to go to Thailand next summer to work at an elephant sanctuary for three months.
“I did everything to put her off the idea but now next year she can go.
“They have said she will need multiple surgeries and once all that is out of the way, hopefully it won’t take any longer than a year, she can go.
“I’m hoping she can do her year in college and on her break can go to Thailand.”
And Jamie revealed how the pretty teenager had even come around to doing some modelling before the alleged attack on December 30.
Her mam said after years of being asked to do it she was finally contemplating giving it a go.
She said: “We have had this discussion over the years. She said she hated when people said it to her about being a model but believe it or not she said to me the other day that she wish she had listened.
“She said to me, ‘I wish I had taken on board what people were saying to me, I’m never going to look like that again. I wish I appreciated it and had done something with it’.”
Jamie concluded by thanking the community, she said: “The support has been amazing. Everybody has been great. I don’t even have the words to express it.
“I would never ever have expected anything like this. Her school has been very supportive and I couldn’t be anymore thankful to the gardai.”
Two people have been charged in relation to the December 30 alleged attack and appeared before the Criminal Courts of Justice last month.
A third male, a 17-year-old, was also arrested and released.
- To make a donation to Alanna’s recovery you can at www.gofundme.com/f/rally-around-alanna-and-hero-friend
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