A woman’s excessive cocaine use led to severe damage to her nose, leaving a large hole in her face and requiring reconstructive surgery.
Kelly Kozyra, 38, first experimented with the drug in 2017 when a friend introduced it to her. Over the next 19 months, she became heavily addicted, spending over £63,000 to sustain her habit.
Her addiction took over her life, leading her to use the drug continuously, even at the expense of eating. Living in Chicago, Illinois, Kelly ignored the warning signs, including frequent nosebleeds and pieces of flesh coming out of her nostrils, until the damage became impossible to overlook.
Eventually, her septum became so eroded that her nose was deformed and began to sink in on itself. She compared her nose to Daniella Westbrook’s – who also battled a rotted septum after prolonged drug abuse.
After interventions from friends and family, Kelly decided to live a sober life in 2021 and has undergone 15 reconstructive surgeries to help restore her nose, including a skin graft from her forehead to create a new tip and an artery from her arm to rebuild the blood supply from her cheek to her nose.
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She said: “I’d been using cocaine for three months daily when I started experiencing bleeding in my nose and was blowing out chunks of skin, then noticed the septum was deteriorating.
“I thought this couldn’t happen to me and I wasn’t doing that much, but I was doing a hell of a lot. I thought it would just heal itself, but I still continued snorting. The septum completely deteriorated. Then I got a hole on the outside of my face, which grew to the size of a dime.
“Eventually I had to shove my pinky up my nose to hold all the cocaine up there so I didn’t lose it out the hole.”
To cover up the hole in her face, Kelly told others she had a sinus infection, and used masks during Covid to help better cover her collapsing nose.
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She’s able to breathe better now and has warned others to talk more about drug abuse to destigmatize it.
“This entire experience has taught me so much. Now I live day by day, that’s how we’re taught to live through the program,” she said.
“I don’t have any plans of relapsing or using. I think being open about it helps me and other people. The more we talk about drug use, the less stigmatized it becomes.”
Doctors warn that cocaine-related complications are becoming more common, with more patients needing treatment for severe nasal damage.
