BATON ROUGE, La. — Three months ago, five-year-old Lucy Nadler was playing with her sister at her uncle's house. His docile Labrador nipped at her face, and took off part of her nose, WWLTV reports.

“Luckily, they thought to look for her nose on the floor, and luckily they found it, and they put it in a glass of ice, and we transported it to Children's Hospital,” said Dr. Jen Erbil a Baton Rouge Rheumatologist, who is Lucy’s mother.  

In the O.R. for three hours, surgeons reattached it, but by the next day, it began to die.

Lucy's mother, Dr. Jen Erbil, is a rheumatologist in Baton Rouge and asked physician colleagues for advice. Many said there was nothing that could be done. Lucy would need months, maybe years of reconstruction from forehead skin later on, but a friend mentioned the hyberbaric oxygen chamber.

After that recommendation, she turned to Harch Hyperbarics in Metairie, where Lucy went into the tank daily for a month, sometimes twice a day. Every three hours at home, Dr. Erbil used a home oxygen concentrator. 

Lucy's scars will likely fade in a year. If not, she can get laser treatment to help. Now Dr. Erbil wants her fellow doctors to learn the value of hyperbaric oxygen.

“It's astonishing to me the benefits of hyperbaric medicine. As a physician, I was not aware of the role of hyperbarics. We are not taught this in medical school. This is severely underutilized,” stressed Dr. Erbil.

In medical cases such as this, as well as diabetes skin problems, insurance does pay for hyperbarics.