Janies Reconstructive Surgery

Article from Ms Magazine Jan/Feb Issue 1996

By:  Jennifer Bingham Hall

For battered women, plastic surgery can be far more than a cosmetic procedure.

Jane Stanley was watching television one night when an advertisement for Face to Face came on the air. The woman featured had had facial scars from battering that looked much like her own. "I sat up in bed and said: "Thats it! I want that," recalls Stanley. Stanley's face bore all the evidence of a 16-year-long abusive relationship. The mother of two had a thick scar from her eyebrow to the tip of her nose from the time her boyfriend shoved her head into the bathroom sink. He'd split her lips open, leaving a trail of scars around her mouth, and given her so many black eyes that the skin on her brow had sagged to cover her eyelids. Though the boyfriend had moved out, Stanley still felt his grip everytime she looked in the mirror. "He said several times that he would always be part of my life because of all the scars he did to my face," says Stanley, who lives in Morehead City, North Carolina. "That's why I had such a gut feeling that I had to do this. I got rid of him and I wanted his hands off my face." In September of 1996, facial plastic surgeon Dr. Cynthia Gregg removed the excess skin and puffy tissue around Stanley's eyes, revised the deep scar around her mouth with lase r skin resurfacing. Gregg says the surgery brightened Stanley's appearance. But she's been even more impressed by her patient's radical change in attitude. For years Stanley hid from the world, wearing her hair in bangs and down in front of her face to cover her scars, and avoiding people. "Before, I never looked someone in the eye because I knew that they were looking at my scars," says Stanley, who went through several months of counseling at a local shelter prior to her operation. "Now I look them straight in the eye and smile. The surgery has helped me do a 360-degree turnaround. For Stanley, just getting the surgery was empowering. Before, her life focased on her boyfriend's needs. "If I had a dollar he got it," she recalls. Going to a counselor, tracking down a doctor who would do the surgery probono, and getting the operation meant standing up for herself. "This is my baby, my project, I investigated it. I found it. I got it. Getting the surgery made me realize I had a backbone," she says. A month after her surgery, the woman who could barely look people in the eye a year earlier spoke to 600 surgeons at a Face to Face fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. She now works at the battered women's shelter that initially helped her. "I can look in the mirror and I don't see anything holding me back there. I don't see any hands," she says. "I'm coming out."

 

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