A British student who suffered horrific burns in an acid attack in Zanzibar has spoken about how she asked a friend to shoot her following the attack.
Katie Gee, 19, was left with scars on 30 per cent of her body following the assault in which she lost an ear.
The student was with her friend Kirstie Trup volunteering at a school when acid was thrown at them from a jerry can by a man on a scooter.
Kirstie said the passenger smiled before hurling car battery acid in the faces of the best pals as they walked to a restaurant last August.
She added that passers-by, including a soldier, ignored their pleas for help as they writhed in agony on the roadside after the unprovoked attack. One even tried to steal Katie's mobile phone and purse, but she grabbed them back.
Immediately she knew what what the liquid was that started eating their flesh immediately.
Following the attack, she wrote in The Sunday Times, she tried to rinse the acid off with water from a shower next to a toilet. Meanwhile, Kirstie was taken to the sea and was scrubbed with salt water.
They went to a local hospital at first which she described as "filthy". But a British student called Ben who they had met earlier on their trip was on placement there and he helped get more water on their burns.
They were then moved to another hospital.
She wrote: "The pain was by now so severe and the thought of being scarred so horrific that at one point I even asked Ben to shoot me."
Katie asked to see her face in a mirror but medics would not allow it and the first glimpse she got of her face was as they left the hospital.
She said: "The person staring back at me from the large, gold-framed mirror was barely recognisable. My face looked like it had been splattered with black and purple paint and the veins beneath the skin were blackened."
At this point she broke down and had to be bundled away from the mirror.
However, that glimpse in the mirror did not prepare her for the full extent of her and Kirstie's injuries which became apparent back in the UK.
"By then my body had swollen to almost triple its size and I had been separated from Kirstie, which was extremely hard for both of us after being together for a month in Zanzibar."
For seven hours, surgeons removed dead skin from the affected areas of her body and since that she has had 15 serious operations with the same amount ahead of her.
Her recovery, she says, is largely thanks to Andy Williams, a surgeon at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital where she is being treated.
He is not only helping to repair the damage to her body, but he has also become a close friend and is helping her to realise that life can go on beyond the attack.
Katie's recovery continues and she still needs physiotherapy three times a day as well as regular hospital appointments, detailing her many corrective and cosmetic operations.
However, there is still a long way to go. She has a recurring dream in which she has completely healed.
"In the dream I would run my fingers across my face in wonderment, my mother standing behind me, emotional about my recovery. Then I would wake up to discover nothing had changed.
http://www.mirror.co.uk
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