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shyscyberchamber.com
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FREAKS
:
The
Faceless Child |
Date
Added
AUG 2003 |
The little girl called Alice was just a
few weeks old when she was rejected by her mother. The infant
was considered to be too much of a burden and the poor woman made the
heart-rending decision that she would never be able to cope with her
or help her in later years to lead anything like a normal life.
For Alice was born without a face.
She had come into the world suffering from one of nature's rarest and
most cruel aberrations, a birth defect known as bilateral cleft face.
Her eyelids were on the side of her head, yet she had no eyes, where
her mouth should should have been there were only small holes opening
into soft mucous membranes, she had no nose, the very shape of her
skull was distorted. She had severe problems simply breathing,
she could only be fed through a tube inserted into her neck. It
seemed that whatever future the stricken baby might have would be a
nightmarish one in a sightless, shuttered world as far removed from an
ordinary life as it might be possible to image.
Alice's first good fortune came when a nurse, Thelma Perkins, at the
University of Tennessee Hospital in Knoxville where she was born, fell
in love with the tragic infant and, with her husband, Raymond, became
her legal guardian. Thelma said: 'Alice was only an hour old
when I first saw her... and I cried that any baby should be born like
that.'
Astonishingly, apart from the appearance of her face, her breathing
problems and difficulties attached to feeding her, Alice was healthy.
In 1983 Alice was 6 years old - and beginning to reap the benefits of
her second stroke of luck which is, against all odds, helping her
learn to lead a life which, though it may never be perfectly normal,
is far removed from the tortured existence it seemed she had been
destined to lead.
Dr John Lynch, a plastic surgeon at the Vanderbilt Hospital saw her
plight and started a serious of operations, to rebuild her face.
He pioneered advances in what he said was only the seventh documented
case of bilateral cleft face in medical history. But it was a
slow, delicate, and nerve racking process, fraught with uncertainty
and the natural impatience of Thelma and Raymond Perkins, who were
awaiting official clearance to adopt Alice as their own child, to see
her progress.
Alice has undergone 11 painstaking operations so far and now has gums
and teeth - which could not previously grow inside her disfigured
mouth - and a nose which has an artificial bone taken from one of her
ribs. Because no grafted-on nose could grow with the rest of
her, Dr Lynch has given her an adult-sized one. Her mouth has
been totally reconstructed, and Alice, having quickly learned how to
move her tongue and jaws, and now eats semi-solid food, the tube
attached to her oesophagus having been removed and mercifully been
rendered useless. |
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