INSIDE LOOKING OUT : Behind Many a Brave Face Lies a Fragile Spirit That Learns to Cope

The girl was maybe 6 years old. Her head barely came to the countertop at the medical office. The mark on her face was small but dark, something between magenta and red-violet in the Crayola box of 64. She looked up at me and smiled tentatively. Her mother looked over at me, not smiling.

I recognized the child’s look. It had been mine. And the woman’s look had been my mother’s, the lioness gaze that meant “say something cruel to my child and I will tear your heart out.”

We three stood at the office window in plastic surgery at Childrens Hospital in Hollywood. Childrens Hospital had always annoyed the hell out of me; each time I drove past, my copy-editing soul roiled, offended by its sign: CHILDRENS HOSPITAL, no apostrophe, as if childrens were the plural of children.

Now that I’m inside, it bothers me less. Here, doctors perform a kind of miracle on the spirit. Here is one of maybe three or four lasers in Southern California that can virtually remove port-wine stain hemangiomas, the birthmarks that look like an Englishman threw his after-dinner tipple in your face.

My variant, the reason I’m here, is Sturge-Weber syndrome. It covers more than half my face, more severe on one side than the other. It trails down my neck and up to my scalp. It gave me glaucoma. In some cases, Sturge-Weber syndrome causes seizures and brain calcifications. In mine, it has caused eruptions and bleeding until the wayward blood vessels are dug out or cauterized shut.

It doesn’t often hurt. The hurt comes from the far side of your face. One patient here, a 12-year-old, broke his hand beating up another boy who mocked him because of the mark on his face. How often had I come close to doing the same? At the movies or in the grocery store, strangers who wouldn’t dream of calling anyone “four eyes” or “peg leg” cry out: “What happened to your face ?”

Children who undergo this laser treatment “won’t be scarred by being called names,” says Karen Sherwood, one of the clinic’s two dermatologists. “Children are very cruel to one another.”

Vivian Mesa was no child when she began coming here. She teaches high school English in South El Monte. She’s 26. Until two years ago, her port-wine stain flowed from her ear and jaw down to her collarbone. Her birthmark, she says, put her in turtlenecks and hair “hanging all over my face.” Mine put me in cover-up before I was a teen-ager.

Vivian’s father would kiss her there--”That’s my spot,” he would say. My parents paid my birthmark no special attention, not even medical--because the treatments back then were radiation, tattooing or sandpapering, which seemed not too evolved from burning me as a witch. What happened to Vivian is what happens to us all. In public, she put up with the looks, the teasing, the lame jokes. Sometimes she explained to those who stared, and befriended those who didn’t. I didn’t suffer fools so well. When strangers quizzed me, I’d lie outrageously, thinking to embarrass them--”Aliens are breeding on my face” or “It’s something new from Revlon. Do you like it?”

When Vivian’s birthmark began to blister, she came to Childrens Hospital. Treatments took three years, but it’s virtually gone. “When you think of plastic surgery,” she says, “you think of it as something people do out of vanity. This is not about vanity, but it sure does something for my confidence.” After years of longing, Vivian can now wear earrings. I just want to be able to blow my nose without having to slap on the cover-up afterward.

All of this has got me wondering what place there is in Clinton’s health plan, the GOP’s health plan or anybody’s health plan for Vivian, for the rest of us. This isn’t about impatient 14-year-olds angling for breast implants or 40-year-olds scheduling a tummy tuck in time for Christmas in Aruba. This is about a 6-year-old girl looking up at you, a girl with a magenta mark the size of her fist on her face. She knows what you can say to her--she’s heard it before--but she hopes you won’t.