A New Face for a New Start

Hard as she tries, Tosha McClintock can’t get used to her new face.

Her chin, which had been beaten until it was barely visible, feels full and heavy now, the result of a reconstructive implant. Her ears, which resembled cauliflowers from repeated pummeling, feel small and flat against her head, sewn closed, no longer bulging with cartilage.

And she can breathe out of her nose again. It had been flattened for so long--a favorite target of her ex-boyfriend’s fists--that McClintock, 29, forgot what it was there for, what it had ever really looked like. She touches her new nose absently now, tracing over it, pushing on it. Sometimes she’ll catch a glimpse of her profile when she turns to look at something, and she has to remind herself what it is.

“It’s so weird,” she said three weeks after surgery. “It’s my nose.”

After enduring five years of domestic abuse that shocked even the counselors and court officials who eventually helped her, McClintock was “the ideal candidate” for reconstructive plastic surgery, said her doctor, Michael Niccole of Newport Beach.

He offered to perform the $15,000 in procedures for free through the Magic Mirror Foundation, which he and several other Orange County surgeons created 20 years ago. Originally intended to give free plastic surgeries to poor children abroad, Magic Mirror recently began helping victims of domestic violence, who have sought surgical help in such large numbers they have overwhelmed other charitable groups.

For months, McClintock had been on a waiting list with Face-to-Face, a national program that specializes in plastic surgery services for battered women and offered through more than 300 doctors across the country, about a third of whom work in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties. Since it began six years ago, Face-to-Face--one of only a few programs of its kind and by far the largest--has seen a dramatic increase in the number of applications, said George Brennan, a Newport Beach surgeon who started the program with the Denver-based National Coalition Against Domestic Violence while he was president of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

More than 2,000 women have been helped since 1994, and hundreds more are on a waiting list at any given time, Brennan said. The numbers speak not only to the program’s success, but also to the overwhelming need of the women to heal inside and out, long after they’ve gained freedom from their abuser.

“What we’ve found is cosmetic surgery gives battered women a much better chance of becoming whole,” Brennan said. “Their bruises and scars are reminders of physical abuse, and their low self-esteem is a product of emotional abuse. The idea is that while this program rehabilitates their bodies, [therapy] rehabilitates their souls.”

Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), who authored a series of laws that went into effect Jan. 1 expanding services and protections for domestic violence victims, said: “Sadly, there’s a high demand for this service, and that is what I really want to work on, what we need to be doing something about. I do applaud the surgeons who are offering their skills to help these women heal. . . . I just wish we didn’t need more of them.

“The FBI says domestic violence claims the lives of four women each day,” Jackson said. “It is critical that these women have the resources they need and a system that will work for them.”

About one in three of the estimated 1 million women battered each year in the United States who need medical care suffer injuries to the face and head, and McClintock, like many others, was told she’d be waiting awhile for a free surgeon who would give her a new look.

“I didn’t want to be a beauty queen, that’s not why I wanted the surgery,” McClintock said. “I just wanted to look normal.”

Niccole, who was contacted by one of McClintock’s counselors, said that while hers was not the first domestic violence case in his program, it was by far the most severe.

“Tosha was so traumatized and scarred for so long, and now here we had a chance to help her start her life over again,” Niccole said. “It was a brave thing for her to do too. Surgery is painful, and she’d had enough pain.”

*

Her ordeal began six years ago, just after McClintock, then 23, began dating a 35-year-old business owner who soon hired her as a partner. The couple moved into an upscale condominium in Newport Beach. McClintock, who described herself as independent, strong-willed and “fiery,” quickly fell into a cycle of abuse that escalated for five years. By December 1998, her face was disfigured, her head was shaved and she had not been allowed outside for nine months.

“I looked like an animal,” she said recently. “I was waiting to die.”

Three days before Christmas of 1998, she managed to escape, although McClintock now thinks her boyfriend may actually have set her free.

It was a moment she can’t forget: He’d beaten her badly, then asked her what she wanted from him. She said she didn’t want her family, some of whom live in Orange County, to find out she was dead on Christmas Day. He paused, then walked out of the condo. For the first time in years, he left the front door not just unlocked, but open.

It was her chance. She waited some 30 minutes, convinced he would realize his mistake and rush back into the house, angry and ready to finish what he’d started. But he didn’t.

McClintock wound up at a domestic abuse shelter in Irvine. Her boyfriend was quickly arrested and charged with kidnapping and attempted murder--one of more than 2,300 felony domestic assault charges filed in Orange County that year. (During the same time, police made 17,000 domestic violence arrests in Los Angeles County; statewide, there were more than 56,000.)

Then, seven months after his arrest and while awaiting trial, McClintock’s boyfriend overdosed on a cocktail of drugs.

His death changed everything for McClintock, who had been healing--and hiding--at the shelter. It meant relief and freedom. And, in a way only abused women and the professionals who help them can understand, grief.

“Here was this man, he was psychotic and abusive, and he did things to me that are unthinkable. But I was in love with him,” McClintock said. “I can’t explain it. The people at the shelter, they understood. They were like, ‘Congratulations, I’m sorry,’ and that’s exactly how I felt.”

*

Such conflicted feelings are all too familiar to Roe Piccoli and the other counselors at Human Options, where McClintock stayed for seven months. It takes a battered woman seven tries, on average, to leave her abuser for good, they said. Once they leave, the real work begins.

“There’s so much shame and guilt and low self-esteem women feel when they finally leave,” Piccoli said. “And in Tosha’s case, the shame and post-traumatic stress were even more intense because of her physical appearance. She was disfigured.”

McClintock set out on her own last July--Independence Day weekend, in fact. She moved into a studio apartment in Irvine, where she locked herself in every night for the first few months. She got a secretarial job where she could hide her face, scarred and still swollen, and went to regular group counseling sessions for abused women. There, she said, she started to find herself.

But her face kept getting in the way. It imprisoned her, reminded her, kept her introverted and withdrawn from people.

“The way he would have liked it,” she said.

She dreamed of a new face, anybody’s face.

The call from the plastic surgeon’s office came a week before Christmas, almost a year to the day after she had fled her Newport Beach condo, blinking in the bright afternoon sunshine at the sailboats that dotted the harbor. She remembers thinking then, at that critical moment when she could have turned back, how beautiful the scene was. If this was the last thing I ever saw in my life, if I were to die right now, I think I could be happy, she thought.

Now McClintock is healing yet again, this time in the safety of her home and in the company of her two cats. Her family, from whom she’d been isolated for so long, is supportive now that they know the truth about her life. For years, she’d sent Christmas cards and letters that camouflaged her pain, a common tactic among battered women who try to hide themselves physically from friends and family.

“Often when relatives finally find out what’s been going on, they feel tremendous guilt of their own,” Piccoli said. “There has to be a reunion so the healing can begin.”

*

McClintock’s doctors said she is recovering remarkably fast from the four surgeries, which took four hours and included ear and nose reconstruction, a chin augmentation and liposuction of the neck. Most patients take at least two weeks to feel “presentable,” Niccole said, but McClintock was healing faster, looking better and regaining feeling in her chin and nose after seven days.

None of it surprised McClintock, though. Her boyfriend used to compliment her on her toughness, the way she always seemed to bounce back after a bruising.

“He used to say I could take a punch better than any guy,” McClintock said. “My body’s used to patching itself up.”

She knows she has a long way to go, even now, with a new face for a new start. The nightmares come and go without warning, and, McClintock said sadly, she is still grieving. She misses him. Not all of the time, and not everything about him, but still. She thinks about him and finds herself wishing he were there.

For those thoughts and other emotional scars, McClintock keeps her counseling appointments. She plans to enroll in college classes this year and find a better job, although she isn’t sure yet what she wants to do.

“I know I’m going to be OK now, and that alone is a huge accomplishment for me,” she said. “Just being able to interact with people and not feel self-conscious or ugly or like everybody is talking about you, that is such an amazing gift for me.”

She touches the end of her nose again and wrinkles it. It is still numb, like her chin and parts of her ears, and her smile is slightly crooked, at least for now. She offers one anyway.

“I am on my way,” she said. “Wherever that is.”