Australian Story
MARIE CLAIRE, 2004
I can’t really remember when I realised I wasn’t the same as the other girls. It dawned on me slowly. Maybe in the same way that you began to understand that all the girls you knew had blonde hair and yours was a dull mousy brown; or that you had a bigger nose than everyone else; or your ears stuck out; or that all the models in the magazines had long legs and yours were disappointingly short.
No matter how many times my family told me I was beautiful, there were early signs that all was not well. There was the way people would look at me sideways on the bus and mothers would tell their children : “Stop staring at that poor little girl.” When they knew their mothers weren’t looking, they’d whisper : “What happened to your face?”
When my mother first saw me in the maternity ward, she thought: “You’re going to have a hard life, little one”. She was keen to toughen me up mentally to deal with what life would throw at me, so there was no sympathy on the day when the cruel reality hit home. I must have been about eight years old when I came home from school and complained that the kids were picking on me. She said: “Go into the bedroom and stand in front of the mirror and when you find something to complain about, you come and tell me.”
Standing there looking at my reflection I could see there was plenty to complain about. My nose was crooked and flat. My upper lip, what there was of it, was scarred and lumpy and behind that my front teeth stuck out at odd angles. The kids at school called me “flat face”, “eagle beak” or “Wendy the Witch”. It looked as if I’d been smashed in the face with a cricket ball. So yes, there was a lot to say to my mother. But I didn’t have the courage to complain, so instead I walked back to the kitchen and told my mother that I couldn’t see anything at all.
Years later, I was able to put a name to what was wrong with me. The kids at school had already found a name for it, probably by asking their parents. They told me that I had a ‘hare-lip’. I heard plenty of jokes about people with hare-lips over the years. We were stupid and couldn’t talk properly. In fact the term “hare-lip” comes from medieval times when it was thought that a hare must have crossed the path of a pregnant woman and bewitched the child in her belly so that it is born with a face which is half animal.
When I was young, only doctors used the medical term for my affliction which is ‘bi-lateral cleft lip and palate’ – a serious facial deformity in which the upper lip and palate fail to form. Instead of a baby’s plump cupid’s bow, there is a just a hole which opens up to the tip of the nose and back through the roof of the mouth. I was a few months old when my face was stitched together in a rudimentary fashion, with the hope that one day corrective surgery would give me a better chance to face the world with more confidence.
As I grew older, each year I travelled from country Victoria to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne to be assessed for my next surgery. My father and I would leave home early in the morning, hoping that this year would be the one when I would be transformed into ‘Princess Wendy’. But there were disappointments year after year. After spending hours in the crowded waiting room of the hospital I would be photographed and told “not this time”. The doctors wanted to wait until my head stopped growing before they operated. When would that be? No-one could tell me. Dad and I would try to cheer each other up on each long, sad drive home.
Finally, I had my major surgery in high school, which has helped me overcome the difficult start I was given in life. I now have a very public face and a successful career in radio, television and journalism and I’m married to Brendan Donohoe, a wonderful man with whom I have two beautiful children, Marley and Maeve. Forty years after the day I stared at myself forlornly in the bedroom mirror, I am in Suva, Fiji, with a medical team from Interplast Australia. I’m about to witness life-changing surgery for children born just like me. Many of these children have been waiting for a miracle for a long time, just as I did.
For the past 20 years a team of specialist reconstructive surgeons has visited countries in South East Asia and the Pacific to operate on 12,500 adults and children. The medical staff are all volunteers whose work is partly funded by AusAID, but they mostly rely on donations from the public, corporations and Rotary clubs throughout Australia. One Rotary club - the Melbourne Merlion club - raised $60,000 from a dinner dance in aid of Interplast which enabled the team to make their first two visits to Burma.
The motto of Interplast is “to humanise a child”. In many of these impoverished societies, children who are born with facial deformities are treated as less than human. Often, they are not considered worthy of an education and their prospects for marriage and children are bleak. Imagine going throughout your whole life and never knowing the intimacy blessing of a lover’s kiss.
DAY ONE
This morning, I am at the Colonial War Memorial hospital in Suva with the Interplast team and a film crew from the ABC television program Australian Story. The broad smiling faces of the hospital staff almost compensate for the broken down surroundings. As we make our way up to the plastic surgery clinic, I see rows of hopeful faces waiting patiently outside the door.
I don’t really know of what use I can be, but I have brought along some photographs from the day I was born and some others of my husband and children. Maybe when the parents look at me now and see pictures of my loving family they will have hope for their children after all.
I sit and talk to one young woman and she shows me the squirming bundle in her arms. Her baby girl has a deformed palate so she can’t suck a bottle and has to be fed with a spoon. I show the woman the photographs of me when I was born. She looks at the pictures and back at me with astonishment. “But you are beautiful!” she exclaims. Her compliment is so readily given, and so heartfelt that I think it must be true. I can feel my composure slipping and run away to find a quiet place to shed a few tears.
Over the morning, no-one in the Interplast team or the film crew is ever far from tears. The children who affect me most are the small, shy ones who clutch at their mother’s skirts, burying their faces in the folds. You see in their big brown eyes that they have already had to endure more than their share of pain. We travel to the rural outskirts of Suva to pick up baby Sereana and bring her to the clinic. I walk up the hill towards an old shack, and a small crowd shouts ‘Bula!’ in greeting. There is a wonderful serendipity in Sereana’s story. Twenty years ago her father Tobia was born with a unilateral cleft lip which was repaired by the Interplast team. When his partner Lavinia gave birth to Sereana with an identical deformity, her father knew there was hope for her.
She is perfect, except for a deep fissure from her upper lip to her nose. If it were left unrepaired she would have no chance of finding a husband. I show my photographs to Sereana’s grandmother, who passes them around to her sisters and daughters. “You wouldn’t even notice now,” says one sister-in-law smiling at me. “Your husband is very handsome,” says Sereana’s grandma. I have to agree and we all laugh. Then I show my pictures to Sereana’s great-grandmother Benina, who is almost 100, and sits on the woven reed floor of their tiny wooden shack. Benina takes a long look at the photographs and then examines me. She doesn’t speak English but her eyes fill with tears and she hugs me with her old bony arms. This time I can’t stop crying with her.
On the way back to the clinic we stop at another house. Julie, a Fijian woman with a calm, confident grace, is carrying a baby in her arms. The blankets are pulled right up over the baby’s face. Behind her shuffles Sireli, her sixteen year old son. My heart lurches. Teenage Sireli is me. He has the same flat squashed nose and scarred lip I had - the legacy of bilateral cleft lip and palate patched up at birth. He cannot meet anyone’s eyes and stares hard at the ground.
I take a peek inside the yellow bundle I see that his baby brother Osi, just three months old, has the same affliction but hasn’t been treated yet. For the first time I see myself as I was born and I am shocked. I think back to what my father says about the day I was born: “It was the best day and the worst day of my life.”
Back at the clinic I sit and talk to Julie and once again I produce my photos. She tells me she has seven children and two of them have been born like this. Julie introduces Sireli to me, but he keeps his head down. “Look up,” she tells him. She turns to me: “I tell him to be proud of who he is.” I know that’s what mothers have to say to their children. It’s what they want for us. But I also know what’s in his heart. He looks in the mirror and can’t find anything to be proud of.
By the end of the day all the patients have been assessed and Serena, Sireli and Osi have been scheduled for surgery tomorrow. Back at the hotel, I think of Sireli. I’m sure he is excited and apprehensive about the big day. I know he’s dreamed of it for so many years. I see him lying in the dark imagining his new handsome face. He is smiling, laughing and kissing a pretty girl.
DAY TWO.
The Interplast team is in high spirits as we gather for breakfast. I’m allowed into the operating theatre today. Dr David Campbell will be repairing baby Sereana’s lip and Dr Vedella “Del” Hinckley will be operating on Sireli this morning. Baby Osi will be seen this afternoon. They will be assisted by Dr Jonathan Christie, the anaesthetist, and two expert nurses Gayle Toohey and Jennifer Keast .Our other anaesthetist, Jennifer’s husband Dr David Keast, is taking the role of project co-ordinator.
I didn’t imagine I would feel as excited as I do when I am getting into my blue surgical pyjamas in the nurses’ locker room. I look at myself in the mirror wearing a paper shower cap and have a crisis moment when I realise I will be on national television and in marie claire looking like a fat blue toadstool! But then I remember that am lucky to have the luxury of vanity. If I had been born in some country other than Australia, maybe I would have spent my whole life avoiding a mirror. As a desperate concession to appearance I put on lipstick.
The nursing staff have done the best they can to prepare their broken down operating theatres. Dr Del shows me the overhead lights in her theatre with half the bulbs blown. “I’ll be operating in the dark, lucky I brought a torch,” she says, only half joking. Soon little Sereana is sedated by Dr Jonathon and nurse Jennifer, who coo over her with infinite care and Dr David seats himself over the operating table. I am sitting in the corner with strict instructions on how to avoid contaminating the scene: “Don’t touch anything green!” I think to myself “no chance…There’s no way I’m leaving this corner.” But then I find myself lost in the wonder of it all, at Dr David’s right hand. Sereana is reborn in front of my eyes. Dr David is so meticulous it’s astonishing. He cuts and folds Sereana’s lip as if he’s performing human origami. Dr Dell tells me a surgeon needs “the heart of a lion, the hands of a woman and the eye of an eagle”. The layers of muscle and skin must all be painstakingly connected in their turn. As the surface is stitched I see how everything fits together like an intricate jigsaw. I look at this tiny child’s face and see her nose is perfect and that she will be left with one tiny scar on her lip. I can’t think of anything more worthwhile to do with your life than this work.
Then Sireli is wheeled into the theatre next door. He’s still shy and I find a moment to go and have a word with him. I explain how the surgery will work - I had the same procedure myself when I was 14 – Dr Dell will take a piece of his bottom lip and reposition it to make up for the tissue which is missing from under his nose. I try to sound cheery, but Sireli’s face is so grave that I finally give way. But while I cry outside his room remembering the day of my own operation, I realise my tears are mostly happy ones.
For the next few hours I watch Dr Del reshape his nose. “I’m trying to remember that he’s Fijian and not give him a little perky Western nose. “I’ve been asking all the staff to take their masks off so I can see what their noses look like,” she jokes. “Yeah,” I reply, “we don’t want a Michael Jackson special!” The Fijian medical staff all think this is pretty funny and it feels good to laugh along with them.
While Dr Del continues to weave her magic I duck around to the recovery room to meet Sereana’s parents who have come to their daughter. Her mother Lavinia is so happy when she sees her gorgeous baby. “Is she perfect?” I ask. “Better than perfect,” Lavinia replies and bends to kiss her tiny forehead. Her father Tobia’s eyes are shiny wet and he can’t stop smiling. “This is a good day. Very good,” he says and I have to agree. I’ve rarely had a better one.
The Interplast team will be working into the night with Sireli and his baby brother, so we leave them at the hospital and head back to our hotel. I am desperate to see how they look tomorrow and if I could hold my breath all night I would. But soon enough the lapping of the water in Suva Bay and the warm tropical night take me away. I dream of a rainforest. Sireli and Osi’s brown faces appear in the middle of pink and yellow hibiscus flowers.
DAY THREE.
I am back at the hospital making my way to the ward where Sireli and Osi are recovering. What will I see? Although I was grateful for my operation, I remember being disappointed when the nurses in the hospital let me see my face. They wouldn’t give me a mirror for a week because they knew that the swollen, bloody flesh and train tracks of bright blue stitches were not a pretty sight. An aunt came to visit me, took one look and promptly fainted.
I had somehow imagined that I would suddenly be beautiful, but the reality was far from that. The chunk of bottom lip had been twisted up to a new position under my nose. To maintain the blood supply, the flesh had not been entirely severed so that my mouth was effectively joined in the middle. It was to stay like that for about three weeks. I couldn’t talk or smile and was fed liquids through one corner of my mouth by a straw.
So I think I’m prepared for the sight of Sireli this morning. It’s his beautiful Fijian nose I see first. It has been liberated from its squashed flat position and has given his face a wonderful sculptured profile. It’s better than my nose and I wonder if Dr Del is available to have another go at me! I am overwhelmed with happiness for Sireli and I can’t stop walking around the bed admiring his profile from all angles. You can’t really appreciate what a nose can do for your face until you haven’t really had one. For the first time Sireli really looks at me. I can see now that he has divine big brown eyes. Of course Sireli’s lips are joined but I notice that the corners of his mouth turn up with the smallest trace of a smile .We have never spoken a word had a conversation, but I think we will never forget each other.
In the bed next to him is his baby brother Osi who is being cradled by his mother Julie. He’s distressed, and is being fed spoonfuls of boiled water. Through his dressings I see my face again, imperfect and patched like a quilt, but Julie tells me that he will have his next operation with Interplast in a year’s time. “I will have two very handsome sons I think!” Julie says, elated. She kisses me goodbye, but I’m reluctant to leave. I’d like to stay with Sireli and be there with him until his scars heal and he can finally look in the mirror and find something to be proud of. But I also know that might take the rest of his life.
The Interplast team will be working sixteen hour days for the next fortnight to get through all the cases they have scheduled. Working against time and in woefully inadequate conditions they are changing the world, one person at a time.
Donations can be made to Interplast at :
Interplast Australia.C/-Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, Spring Street. Melbourne. VIC.3000.
Cheques should be made payable to:
Interplast Australia Overseas Aid Fund. All donations are tax deductable.
Interplast can be contacted directly at interplast@surgeons.org