AS a professional fire-eater, Sophie Lee diced with danger every time she took to the stage.
But at a charity event in 2018, a living nightmare unfolded when an air conditioning unit blasted a fireball back at the model, now 27, causing her face and chest to “go up in flames”.
What followed was five years of intense surgery, chemotherapy, and therapy for the mental trauma, as Sophie’s burns became keloid scars (benign tumours).
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Sophie, from Darwen, Lancashire, says coming so close to death on numerous occasions has completely changed her outlook on life, and insists she wouldn’t be here without the NHS service she received.
It's one of the reasons she wants to thank the NHS and support The Sun's Who Cares Wins Awards.
On-stage horror accident
Sophie’s accident occurred on April 1, 2018 – “April Fool’s Day”, as she notes – while she was performing a fire-breathing act at a charity event in Chicago, aged just 22.
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She was rushed to hospital and spent a month in intensive care in America by herself, while receiving treatment for the burns.
“I was so swollen,” she recalls. “My oesophagus was closed and it was hard for me to breathe because it was so swollen around my face, my neck and my chest.
“It was really hard for me to do anything.
“I couldn’t eat or drink or do any of those normal things. I had to go back to being a baby again.
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“The doctors couldn’t even do much for me, because it was such a fresh injury and they needed to wait for the swelling to go down and everything to settle.”
'There was no cure'
When Sophie got home, she was misdiagnosed with a hypertrophic scar at the first hospital she went to, meaning the skin was slightly raised but wouldn’t grow.
She continues: “Unfortunately, as time went on, it did grow into a tumour, as a result of my skin reacting so drastically to such a deep burn – and I found out there's actually no cure in the world for keloid tumours.”
Sophie was then referred to a skin specialist, Dr Charlotte Defty, at St Helens Hospital, who she calls “an angel sent from above”.
She says: “I feel like the universe brought us together. They say that surgeons are angels sent from above, and I really feel like she was my angel sent from above that was meant for me, the surgeon that was meant for me.”
By the time of Sophie’s first consultation with Dr Charlotte, her tumour had “grown massively”.
She continues: “And then, within the space of a few weeks, I went to see her again, and this scar just overtook my face.”
Chance of death
Due to Sophie’s rare scarring, she became a case study, and was opened up globally to doctors – although “no one wanted to touch" her, as the tumours were so big.
“They were worried the tumours could grow back bigger or there could be a chance of death,” she explains.
While Sophie was initially thought she would have to live with her tumours, unexpected help came in the form of a pioneering surgeon from Israel, Dr Nimrod, who agreed to carry out cryosurgery.
This is a process which sees liquid nitrogen placed on to her tumours to kill them off over time.
“It’s like freezing off a big wart, except on a much bigger scale,” she says.
But as it was a trial, Sophie was warned it could have dangerous – and potentially fatal – consequences.
She recalls: “He said, ‘You'd have to take into consideration that this is a trial, it's not a method that can be proven to help you. There are three ways about this; It could be that it will work and the result we want is that the tumour will fall off, and it will leave you with new skin, or it might grow back, and could be worse, or death.’
“I was 22, 23, and these decisions are so far beyond what you should be deciding at that age.
“At this point, you should think, ‘What am I going to wear on my next night tonight? Rose or white wine?’”
Traumatic surgery
Sophie chose to have the surgery at St Helens with Dr Charlotte; the first round lasting around five and a half hours.
"It was so painful,” she recalls. “But Charlotte was amazing. She really looked after me.
“She was like, ‘Don't worry. We're going to sort your face out. Just think it's like having a nice facial. You're going to be fine. It's all good.’”
She was then transferred to Whiston Hospital to recover for a week.
“It was really traumatic for me,” Sophie says. “It put me into a big state of depression, not knowing where I was, what was going to happen.”
The healing process after being released from hospital wasn’t much fun either, as Sophie waited for necrosis to happen – a process in which the skin starts dying, turns black and falls off.
She laughs: “I literally rang my mum one day, as I was about to go in the shower, and I was like, ‘Mum, my face has fallen off. What do I do? I don’t have the heart to put it in the bin because it's my face! Do I keep it in the freezer?’”
Sophie had to wait another six to eight months before she could be reassessed – and unfortunately found there were still parts of the tumour left.
For this reason, she had to have a second round of surgery, which was a success, but she had to have a series of steroid injections to help break down the scar tissue that couldn’t be frozen off.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The steroid injections then stopped working and Sophie has been having chemo injections since, for the last year and a half.
However, she says: “Recently I've been told that hopefully I won't need them anymore, so I'm so grateful this is the light at the end of the tunnel and I think I will be a case study for the rest of my life.
"I'm so grateful that this was on the NHS and being a case study, I got the support from the NHS that was needed for all this research, not just medically, but also mentally.
“The surgeons do one job which is to get the injury and get your skin back to where it needs to be in your body. But the mental part is the part that I don't think a lot of people talk about. And that has been one thing that has been a massive struggle for me.”
Sophie has now teamed up with St. Moriz, as part of the tanning brand’s campaign Ready To Glow, aiming to empower individuals to be themselves and inspire everyone to do whatever makes them feel confident.
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She adds: “I used to crave success and the ‘perfect’ life, but success to me now is being at peace, being happy, my family and friends are healthy, I'm healthy. And that to me is success.
“I'm just grateful that I'm here. It's a blessing that I got given a second chance at life because a lot of people don't get that.”
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