Florida doctor uses shoulder bone to rebuild patient's face

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A woman born and raised in Jupiter, Florida, was on a college graduation trip when she nearly died in a car accident.

Amber Roth is now 26 years old, but in May of 2021, she had just graduated from the University of Tennessee and was set to start a computer coding job at a Fortune 500 company. To celebrate, she took a trip to Helen, Georgia.

“Helen is my middle name and Helen is my grandma’s name," Roth said. “It’s the most gorgeous German town I’ve ever seen.”

She made it to Georgia one day ahead of her family and decided to visit a waterfall an hour from Helen while she waited for them, but she never made it.

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Roth was waiting to merge onto the highway at a stop sign when she became collateral damage from a nearby collision.

“The truck spun around and then hit me and that’s when the tailgate was dislodged and flew through my windshield,” she said.

The accident caused her to lose the ability to hear in her left ear, her lungs collapsed, forcing her to use a ventilator and the tailgate shattered Roth's cheek. As a result, she also could not close her right eye as a result.

“I have a traumatic brain injury, so I don’t remember the collision," she said. "I don’t remember two to three months after the collision."

Roth had reconstructive surgery in Georgia after the accident, but it was the first in a long road to recovery.

“When I finally got released from rehab and home to Jupiter, we found out that my plates; all the titanium plates in my head were infected,” she said.

That is when she met Dr. Anastasiya Quimby at Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach.

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“There was no viable structure left in her cheekbone area," Quimby said. "That entire area was just scarred.”

To reconstruct the right side of Roth's face, more skin was needed, but Quimby did not want to get that skin from another place on Roth's body.

“Because Amber is very young and she has decades and decades of life ahead of her, I really wanted to give her facial skin that looked like facial skin,” Quimby said.

Quimby decided 'tissue expanders' in Roth's face would allow for her to grow new, healthy facial skin, so she could eventually put in a new cheek structure.

“Tissue expanders are very well-known in the medical field, but they are most commonly used for breast reconstruction,” Quimby said.

After more than six months of expanding tissue in Roth's face, a piece of Roth's shoulder was taken to place in her cheek.

“Anatomically, it fit very nice into the area of the defect that we needed it in,” Quimby said.

Quimby used a virtual surgery planning tool and worked with Dr. James Azzi as well as engineers on Amber Roth's case.

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Roth said her confidence is returning and she credits Quimby for her boosted self-esteem.

"She’s not just a surgeon; I see her as a friend because she is really helping me through this,” Roth said.

“I consider myself very lucky that I live in a time and day when I can sit down at a computer and think of some crazy thing and then be able to make it happen," Quimby said.

Click here to help Roth pay for her mounting medical expenses.