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Although the incident happened 23 years ago now, 25-year-old Alyssa McDonald remembers it like it was just yesterday.
“It was Memorial Day, my grandmother was making something that caused her to melt butter on the stove,” she recalls. “Me being a curious child, I climbed up to have a look and accidentally pulled the pot of hot butter down onto myself.”
The hot liquid spilled directly onto McDonald’s face. It missed her head, but her face was immediately burned.
When she began screaming, her uncle rushed over and tried to wipe the butter off her face over the sink, but it was already too late. McDonald’s skin had already been burned so badly it was “melting off [her] face,” in her words.
Her family rushed her to the hospital as soon as possible, but doctors weren’t hopeful about McDonald’s prospects. They told McDonald’s family to call their pastor and begin making funeral arrangements as soon as possible because they didn’t think McDonald would pull through at all.
Then McDonald fell into a coma. Her doctors essentially gave up on her at that point.
But somehow, against all the odds stacked against her, McDonald woke up from her coma and fought back against her burns.
More and more time passed, and McDonald continued to prove her doctors wrong. Soon enough, she was well enough to begin undergoing skin reconstruction surgeries that would attempt to reduce the appearance of her burn scars.
In spite of these surgeries though, McDonald’s peers continued to mock her and call her a “monster” whenever they caught sight of her face. Kids would even run away from her, crying, because they were so scared of her appearance.
McDonald even recalled one year when she went to the store to get ready for Halloween. “We went to the store for candy, there were loads of kids in costumes and the cashier thought I had a Halloween mask on,” she recalled. “She told me, ‘It’s the most realistic mask I’ve seen all day.’ When I told her it was my real face she was mortified.”
By the time McDonald was just 16 years old, she already had over 100 surgeries. She’s received skin grafts, had a prosthetic eye fitted to replace the eye in which she lost her vision, and even reconstructed her lips and eyebrow.
But at that point, McDonald realized – there was little else that could be done to make her appearance look more “normal,” so she decided to stop having surgeries completely.
“It’s taken me a very long time to get time to get to this point but I’ve realized [my scars] make me who I am. There is nothing I can do about it, what’s happened to me or how I look, people either will or won’t accept me – either way that’s not my problem,” she said.
“My scars are my most important accessory and bring out my personality. If I have a beautiful dress on they bring that out and are like diamonds to me. I would not change my scars, I'm in love with them, even if there was a magical surgery to give me whole new skin I would turn it down,” she added emphatically.
