Articles labeled: prom

Cody Hall, a 15-year-old English girl that was born with hemangioma, a tumorous birthmark on her face that grew with age and caused disfigurement, has had 18 reconstructive surgeries and will now attend her first prom. Click through to the full story to see photos of the amazing transformation (not to mention a picture of her as a baby with Fergie! Score! Uh, this one, not that one.)

“Cody came to me several years back after she had undergone an initial procedure in San Francisco,” Hall’s surgeon, Milton Waner, told FOXNews.com. “She had some really bad problems at the time. It was a very difficult situation. She had excessive scarring from an aggressive hemangioma.”

Most of her 18 surgeries have been performed at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

“She had extensive tissue destruction and we performed several procedures to restore her face back to normalcy,” said Waner, who is co-director of the Vascular Birthmarks Institute of New York at Beth Israel Medical Center and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.

Waner said hemangiomas are benign tumors of the stem cells. Although the tumors are not fatal, their complications can be.

Jessica Pope, an 18-year-old who attends Glenbard East High School in Chicago’s western suburbs, was allowed to bring her 21-year-old boyfriend to prom last weekend. The catch? They were only able to be there for ten minutes. School officials were concerned because they didn’t want someone in attendance that can legally buy booze for other students.

[Pope’s boyfriend Francisco] Velasco, a Marine stationed at Fort Lee, Va., received permission from his superiors to fly to Chicago for the weekend just for the dance.

Pope said that after dropping off friends at the Signature Room in Woodridge on Saturday and stopping briefly inside to say hello, school officials backed off and allowed the couple inside — if only for a few minutes.

School Principal Robert McBride shook Velasco’s hand “and went out of his way to say he wasn’t getting let in not because of any disrespect for the military,” Pope said. “It was just policy. Then another dean told us we could come inside for a bit and have some fun. I figured we would get a half-hour.”

But Pope said that within 10 or 15 minutes, McBride and several other school officials were at her table urging the couple to leave the banquet hall immediately while they were in the middle of dinner.