A horrific swimming pool accident left a teenager without her intestines and unable to eat food for the last 10 years.
Salma Bashir, 16, loves to eat seafood - she'll take savory over sweet any day - but she hasn't been able to eat properly for over 10 years.
The teenager doesn't have small or large intestines or a gallbladder; while her stomach is an open wound that needs to be dressed daily and constantly leaks.
Salma, who lives in Pittsburgh with her mom and two younger brothers, still chews food at home so she gets the taste of her mom's home cooking, discretely wrapping her chewed mouthfuls in tissue and throwing away in a plastic bag at her feet.
But she'd give anything to eat properly again.
Salma Bashir, 16, needs five transplants that will cost $3 million after her first transplant was rejected
Salma lost her intestines in an accident while on holiday with her family in Alexandria, Egypt. Then-five-year-old Salma wanted to play in the baby pool while her pregnant mother kept an eye on her older brother in the bigger pool. She sat on the pool's suction valve and the force was so strong that it ripped her small intestines from her body, before anyone had a chance to pull her away
Salma told Barcroft TV: 'I am not the kid who goes, "Oh my God, ice-cream!" I love savory stuff, I like meat, I like seafood, I don't always have seafood but I love seafood!
'I don't technically need to eat but yet somehow I get the sensation that I'm hungry.
'Maybe it's a brain thing; maybe it's a mind thing. I have no idea.
'It would be awesome to swallow the food again.'
Small for her age, Salma relies on a TPN, total parental nutrition bag, hooked up to her body, to get the required nutrients.
'It's basically a bag full of fluids with all the nutrition you need, such as calcium, sodium, glucose, all the vitamins and everything you need. I'm hooked up to that for 20 hours a day. When it first gets hooked up, it's about 15 to 20 pounds.
'I'm about four-foot-three, so I'm very small. The reason I don't absorb food is because I don't have the intestines at all. So there's nowhere for it to go if I eat anything.'
Salma lost her intestines in an accident while on holiday with her family in Alexandria, Egypt.
Then-five-year-old Salma wanted to play in the baby pool while her pregnant mother kept an eye on her older brother in the bigger pool.
Her mother, Dena Ghaly, remembers: 'She went one time and she came back, she went another one it is very close I can see her it is just the third time she went and she didn't come back.'
Small for her age, Salma relies on a TPN, total parental nutrition bag, hooked up to her body, to get the required nutrients
Salma had sat on the pool's suction valve and the force was so strong that it ripped her small intestines from her body, before anyone had a chance to pull her away.
Salma added: 'I was just swimming all of a
