About Face

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About Face

INTRODUCTION
The Surgery of Happiness

Introduction The Surbery of Happiness Choosing a Surgeon Are You a Good Candidate

My FATHER WAS IN THE JEWELLRY BUSINESS, and when I was a young boy I spent hours with him watching cutters bent over their workbenches, searching for capillary flaws in tiny gems, Theirs was the art of cutting and polishing, of creating beauty in tiny faces of diamond and ruby and emerald. They wore jewelers’ lamps strapped to their foreheads, and sometimes a magnifying loop. It was the peace and quiet of the haloed work that I liked, the focus on the beauty at hand. My father once told me that he felt a kind of responsibility toward the selection of each stone, that it was up to him to see the beauty inside and describe it to his customers.

There were no surgeons in my family, though my great-great-grandfather, whose name was Passmore May, was a pathologist in Toronto, and my father’s father was a dentist. My love for beauty came from my father, but my love for medicine - what led me to become a facial cosmetic surgeon, an otolaryngologist - started with a bomb.

I was fifteen and growing up in the leafy Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale when I started to dabble in scientific experiments. With one of my friends, a boy who lived across the street, I hooked up a king of telegraph line between our houses with the wires draped through the trees; we had a code for exchanging secret messages.

One day, with another boy who was and still is a close friend, I made a pipe bomb in the basement of our home, It went wrong, exploded and blew off his hand. His blood was everywhere.

Years later, I came across a book by an American surgeon named Richard Selzer, titled Letters to a Yonge Doctor. He wrote, “Do not be dismayed by the letting of blood, for it is blood that animates this work...Red is the colour in which the interior of the body is painted.” Selzer is a gifted writer, and I wished I’d had such poetry to help me through the day of the bomb. But mostly, I wished that I could have helped my friend, maybe saved his hand. I am not the first surgeon born of a desire to help, to save. My earliest work was with cancer patients, to replace lost dignity by restoring wayward parts.

It took me awhile to settle on otolaryngology (pronounced otto-lar-in-golly-gee), which is more commonly known as ear, nose and throat surgery. Or, if you like, head and neck surgery. Otolaryngology actually comes from the longer word, otorhino-laryngology, combining the Greek root words oto for ear, rhino for nose and larynx for throat.

Otolaryngologists operate within the intricate network of the ear, nose, face, sinuses, pharynx, larynx, oral cavity, neck, thyroid, salivary glands, bronchial tubes and esophagus. Some Otolaryngologists incline toward a special interest in reconstructive cancer surgery of the head and neck, or they might become specialist in ear work, curing disease and infection, and even deafness in some cases. One group of Otolaryngologists treats nose and sinus disorders. But because of our detailed knowledge of the head and neck, many of us become skilled in facial plastic surgery, and I knew very early that this was to be my calling.

I can trace my fascination with faces to the years I spent living with my mother and father while my father was away at war. My grandfather, Albert Samuel May, put on puppet plays for my birthday, and he taught me how to stage the classic, late-nineteenth-century Punch and Judy show with antique hand puppets. I was a shy kid, and something about the idea of being able to transmit thoughts, and even slapstick humor, as a puppeteer, was a great release. I got to know every line on every face of the many puppets my grandfather owned; they peopled my imagination. I’ve since inherited my grandfather’s collection and added many masks and puppets of my own. I like to read faces the way other people like to read books, and so my progression toward facial plastic surgery seemed perfectly natural.

Like every other doctor, I took two years of premed training, then four years of medical school, followed by a year of internship. Along the way, I learned general surgery, orthopedics and other things, but for me, there was always something undefinable missing. One day, I began to learn about nasal surgery, and the more I got into it, the more fascinated I became. I decided to choose the surgical specialty of otolaryngology, and went on to four yeas of specialty training through the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of Toronto.

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