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Lessya Kotelevskaya was a stunning blond and a businesswoman until she was misdiagnosed with terminal cancer and disfigured by radiation treatments. The lady lived in a car was basement in Kazakhstan and is a single mother.

A new ray of hope emerged for her when a Louisville reconstructive surgeon and University of Louisville Hospital agreed to donate more than $1 million for surgeries and care to correct the tragic results caused.

Last year Kotelevskaya was located by a cousin in Louisville who’d been trying to find her since their Ukrainian-born family lost touch after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, reported USA Today.

Before she was brought to Louisville in July by her cousin, she was taken to new doctors. They concluded that a growth in her jaw was not at all cancerous. With this conclusion a death sentence too was lifted which Kotelevskaya had been carrying for more than a decade.

The misdiagnosis and intense radiation treatment completely melted her skin and bone and also left a hole in her face that made it extremely hard to talk, eat or even find a work.

“This is my best wish, that I had all these years, to have a normal face, to eat and live like everybody else,” Kotelevskaya, 30, said in interview, according to USA Today. Her Louisville cousin Oleg Sennik was translating for her.

“She’s been unbelievably strong throughout this whole ordeal,” he also said.

“I moved to the United States in 1996, but I’d completely lost track of them. The Internet wasn’t so available then.”

At the age of 19 Kotelevskaya opened a small clothing store in Kostanay. Same year she was attending a sports event where she was accidentally elbowed in the jaw.

“She couldn’t work, because everybody would look at her and say something’s wrong with her, and she’s going to die anyway,” Sennik added according to USA Today. “She was totally rejected by society.”