Nurses Stage Party on 17th Birthday : Surgery Continues for Acid Victim

The room was filled Thursday with songs and a cake and the gift-wrapped rock tapes that go with a teen-age girl’s birthday celebration.

But Cheryl Bess could not eat the flower-decorated birthday cake that the hospital cafeteria provided, nor thank her nurses for the impromptu party in the UCI Burn Center, her home away from home since her face was literally burned off 18 months ago with acid.

For now she cannot speak, and so a grateful squeeze of a hand would have to do for a few days.

“I think they knew she appreciated it,” said her mother, Norma Bess of Garden Grove. “There’s been so many surgeries that, after all these months, those nurses are like her friends and family in there.”

Left Her Blind

Cheryl is blind, and even without the dressings that covered her burn-scarred face and neck, she would not have been able to see the festivities.

She spent her 17th birthday recovering from one of numerous surgeries she has undergone to rebuild her face since she was attacked by a man who left her, in the words of one detective, “like a walking skeleton.”

A maintenance man at the San Bernardino housing project where the Besses lived was convicted last August of abducting Cheryl, driving her to a remote area near Victorville, attempting to rape her, then emptying a gallon jug of industrial drain cleaner over her upper body before leaving her in the desert to die.

During a three-hour surgery Wednesday--at least the 20th operation that she has undergone since the October, 1985, attack--surgeons continued their efforts to contour, resurface and build her new face.

In the months since she was disfigured, doctors have constructed a nose, lips and eyelids with skin grafts, according to her plastic surgeon, Dr. Bruce Achauer. On Wednesday, doctors evened out her sagging lip, grafted skin from her chest to her face, honed down her nose, widened one of her nostrils and surgically loosened skin on her neck.

Hope for Right Eye

“The right eye is the only one we have any hope for vision from,” Achauer said Thursday. “So we keep adding skin, which we did Wednesday, to the right eyelid, which is necessary if she is ever going to see again.”

In the meantime, her mother said, Cheryl has graduated from the Braille Institute’s reading program and completed its course in independent living skills--learning to identify objects, how to put things away in her closet, advanced typing, beginning cooking and some sewing.

She is weaving a pillow for her mother, Cheryl said recently, and continues to attend classes twice a week at the institute’s Anaheim chapter. Cheryl, who would have been a junior this year at San Bernardino High School, receives academic tutoring at home.

Though she dreamed, even after the attack, of becoming a pediatrician, Cheryl has since “become realistic,” Norma Bess said Wednesday.

“She has reconciled herself (to the fact) that if she doesn’t get her sight back, it isn’t possible to be a pediatrician,” Bess said. “So in the meantime, she’s talking about going to school for music, her second choice. She’s pretty good right now on the piano!”

Her recovery has been a psychological struggle as well, but those close to Cheryl say that she is improving with dignity and courage. Her plucky attitude has inspired thousands of people from around the world to write letters, mail musical tapes, film cheerful videotapes and--in Florida--auction drinks in a saloon to help pay her medical expenses.

Participated in Hands

She keeps herself busy, too. On Sunday, she joined thousands of others at the Crystal Cathedral, holding hands and singing during the Hands Across America event.

“She’s a great patient, an excellent patient,” Achauer said. Her attitude, he said, “is remarkable, it’s really wonderful.”

And though there are better places to spend birthdays than hooked to tubes in a hospital bed, Cheryl made the best of it Thursday, reading Tom Sawyer in Braille and listening to rock music and books on tape. She will remain hospitalized until early next week, Norma Bess said, chuckling as she added: “I think she’ll be singing and talking before then.”