In an instant, their faces were gone
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Doug Surowiec's surgeon, Steven Bonawitz, examines his face during an appointment last week at UPMC Presbyterian.
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On Oct. 5, 1992, at 5:30 p.m., Louise Ashby was driving up Doheny Drive in Los Angeles. Newly arrived in Hollywood from Great Britain, the young actress was ready to seek her chance at stardom.
On April 5, 2003, at about 1 p.m., JR Martinez had been in Iraq for just a month when he was asked to drive the next stretch of road in his Army unit's Humvee.
And four months ago, on March 7, Doug Surowiec was bicycling home at 6:30 p.m. from a long Sunday trip into Ohio and back to Beaver County, enjoying the weather and the feeling of well-being from his strenuous exercise.
Within seconds of those moments, Ms. Ashby would go from a young beauty to a woman with a shattered face; Mr. Martinez would run over a land mine and be trapped in his burning vehicle; Mr. Surowiec would fly off his bicycle into a metal guardrail that would slice off his nose and lips.
In those horrible instants, the faces they had known disappeared forever.
PG SLIDESHOWTheir new faces would be shaped by surgery. But only they would be able to shape how they faced the world.
Ms. Ashby was 21 on that warm fall day 18 years ago in Los Angeles. She was driving a convertible when a driver coming the opposite direction crossed the center line and slammed into her.
The impact hurled her head-first into the driver's side window post.
"One of my emergency doctors told me it was like dropping an egg; my skull just smashed like an eggshell. My brain was resting on my left eyeball," she said in a recent interview in Santa Monica, Calif.
The impact destroyed part of the left frontal lobe of her brain. It severed her optic nerve, leaving her blind in her left eye. From scalp to cheek, the left side of her face was shattered.
She underwent 11 hours of brain surgery and 22 hours of reconstructive facial surgery.
And while surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Hospital put her face back together as well as they could, the left eye bone and cheekbone were slightly misaligned, said her eventual plastic surgeon, Henry Kawamoto.
"When they put her together at Cedars," Dr. Kawamoto said in an interview in his Santa Monica office, "she was pretty bruised and bloody and they did the best they could. But they were off a little bit, and with the face when you're off a little bit, it dominoes down."
Today, Mr. Martinez is a soap opera actor, portraying police officer Brot Monroe on ABC's "All My Children."
But on that broiling day in 2003 near Karbala, Iraq, he was a 19-year-old infantryman in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
First Published July 25, 2010 12:00 am
