In 2022, Juanita Jimenez encountered the unimaginable. Then 22 years old and a senior at Lehman College, her life changed in an instant when a woman threw sulfuric acid on her in an unprovoked attack as she was commuting to Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital, where she worked as a primary care assistant.

The accident caused second- and third-degree burns that permanently disfigured her appearance, and when she looked at herself in the mirror for the first time after the incident, she felt “really distraught,” she tells PEOPLE.

“I don’t think that I ever fully adjusted to my facial scars,” adds Juanita, who underwent debridements (medical procedures that remove dead skin from a wound to reduce infection risks and promote healing, per Healthline) at Jacobi Medical Center.

Things started to look up for Juanita when she messaged Dr. Carl Truesdale, a Beverly Hills, Calif.-based plastic surgeon who also documents his patients’ cosmetic enhancement journeys on social media. “He specializes in keloids [surgeries] and that’s specifically what I was struggling with,” she says, adding that his past work on Black women also reassured her. “Every other doctor and surgeon that I had a conversation with in New York kept saying that with Black skin, you got to be a lot more cautious. I already just wasn’t really confident with those doctors and [Dr. Truesdale] was the most promising doctor I had during that struggling time.”

Juanita reached out Dr. Truesdale over TikTok for a second opinion, but her story struck so much of a chord that he offered to perform Juanita’s reconstructive surgeries, which might’ve cost $80,000, for free.

“I wanted to look like the old me,” says Juanita, who modeled before the accident. “I never really ever thought of or considered any enhancements [before the acid attack]. I love my natural beauty, from my hair to my nose. My main thing was, ‘I could show you a before picture please just get me exactly or close to how I looked before.'”

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In January 2024, Juanita flew out to the West Coast for her operations, which were divided into two in order to reduce the risk of running into blood supply issues, Dr. Truesdale recalls in his Beyond the Surface YouTube series.

Essentially, he performed a four-hour “reverse facelift” or what is medically called a deep-plane cervicofacial rotation-advancement flap to rebuild her nose and lip area, which had merged together due to the keloid, using muscle and skin. “I wanted my lip to be lowered from the top. That was my main priority, because I felt like that was the first thing you could see when you look at my face and see my scar,” says Juanita.

Nine months later, she flew back to California to remove the keloid from her under chin area, which was done during a two-hour procedure.

What Juanita was most excited for after her transformation was gaining her confidence back — and it’s safe to say that that was very much achieved.

“I’m very happy at this stage of my life,” says Juanita, who graduated college and is now focused on passing the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). “That’s why I was so glad that I pushed forward. Even through all the surgeries, I still [finished] school. Now I could really put this whole thing behind me and be a doctor.”