She had been a fire breather for 18 months. One night it went horrifically wrong

Ensuring there was enough space on stage, checking the air con was switched off, a damp towel on standby for emergencies.

Sophie Lee had done everything right. Despite taking up fire breathing just one year before, the 22-year-old couldn’t wait to perform at a huge event in Chicago.

The show had gone perfectly until the final act. As Sophie took a deep breath in, a fireball blew back at her, her face and chest instantly going up in flames.

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It later came to light that someone had turned the air conditioning on, devastating Sophie’s performance in the most tragic of ways.

Struggling to recall the moments following the accident, the next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital bed.

“My face just felt like a balloon,” she told the Manchester Evening News. “Like when you overfill a water balloon and you know any minute it’s going to pop. I felt like it was going to pop.”

Sophie spent a month undergoing intensive care in the USA while receiving major treatment for her burns.

Sophie, now 28, and living in Manchester city centre, can remember the moment she saw the damage to her face for the very first time. “When I started to come round, they told me I needed to shower,” she added. “This was the first time I saw the extent of how bad it was.

“They wheeled me past some mirrors and I was drowsy and hazy but I saw a really big face muscle. When I went into my room and I was a bit more myself, oh my God, I didn’t even recognise that person.

“My face was so swollen to the point where I couldn’t even open my eyes. I looked like I’d just been jumped.

“I was mashed and mangled. I just cried and asked them to take all the mirrors down.”

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