Article About a Man Without a Face

This article was in the Sunday Tennessean's Life Section.

Truly remarkable....let's count our blessings that our life is not as tough as the man without a face:






While Mark Tatum lost his eyes and nose to a rare infection, his heart remains safe in the arms of his beloved wife

MACEO, Ky. — In a little house in a hollow here, a hollow called Tatum's Creek, a mostly faceless 46-year-old man sits in his recliner, playing an air guitar.

He's more animated than he's been in weeks, maybe in months. ''Some day they will make a guitar with strings in Braille,'' Mark Tatum teases.

He talks about the long-ago hard rock band he was in that played in town squares and at fairs. He asks his wife, Nancy, to put the song they used to dance to on the CD player. Pop replaces rock as Unchained Melody massages the room.

''Honey, I wish we could dance again,'' Mark tells Nancy. ''But you would have to lead.''

Memories make for good times. Memories make for bad times. Mark Tatum knows.

Once, he was agile and able, the champion marksman in the hollow.

Now, he feels for and can't find his Little Mermaid toothbrush to clean his bottom teeth, the only ones he has left since battling a rare and often fatal infection that cost him most of his face — his eyes, his nose, his cheekbones, upper jaw, upper teeth, soft palate and hard palate.

''Nancy,'' he asks, as he loses his balance, ''would you please brush my teeth?''

She does. His blindness, as well as a recent stroke that left his right side partially paralyzed, sometimes leaves Mark unstable. Sometimes, he can't walk at all.

Then, Nancy pushes him in a wheelchair a friend found for them at a yard sale, just as Nancy will push him for a dinner out on the town this evening.

Friends are celebrating the debut of Mark's third facial prosthesis, which he snaps on as they leave for dinner.

For two years, Mark waited for his face to heal enough for a plastic surgeon to begin work on his first prosthesis. He hardly went out at all then.

''I didn't want to scare little kids,'' he says. ''I remember how a disfigured face used to unnerve me.''

Facing reality

It took Nancy's ingenuity to eventually coax Mark out of the house. She bought him an oversize pair of rose-colored glasses.

''I hid behind them like they were a mask,'' Mark says. ''I'm a tough guy, but I know how it feels to be thought of as a freak. Damn bad, buddy. Damn bad. I want people who can't stand to look at me without my face to realize that I gave up my face to save my life.

''I didn't do nothing noble, I just did what was necessary.''

One of Mark's cousins, Connie Humphrey, did what she thought was necessary when she urged Mark to enter Scar Wars, a somewhat tasteless radio competition in Louisville.

Mark, a man without a face, was the unanimous winner.

''His family and I did almost anything to get Mark out of the house,'' Nancy says. ''His isolation wasn't good for him.''

By the time Mark received his first prosthesis, he was ready to socialize again.

Today, he looks forward to every excursion, especially meals out with friends.

On this evening out, Mark wears a T-shirt and sweat pants, ironed no less, for comfort. He wants to look his best. He knows people will recognize him. They always do, no matter where he is, from the ongoing media blitz that began last year.

''I got my first face last February and the whole world came calling and keeps calling,'' Mark says. ''I was in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and on Larry King and Maury Povich and Ripley's Believe It or Not and CNN and so many others, I forget.''

Mark wears his third face for the first time on this evening.

He received it just before Christmas from a maxillofacial technician in Arizona who believed he could help Mark look more like he used to look. Though the prosthesis costs about $10,000, the technician gave it to Mark because he knows the sagging state of Mark's finances.

Mark's first prosthesis was paid for by Medicare and his second one was donated by Scott Fiscus of Nashville.

''I wanted Mark to know he has friends in unknown places,'' Fiscus says.

Nancy thinks the newest device most clearly resembles the Mark of old.

''It just looks less artificial than the previous two,'' she says. ''The eyes look almost real, like Mark's brown eyes did, though they don't blink.''

Mark likes the feel of the new prosthesis and wants to put it to the test.

In a dimly lit restaurant near his small town in western Kentucky, Mark Tatum makes what he knows to be a sure bet.

He pulls his Louisville Cardinals baseball cap low on his forehead, slightly leans forward and asks, ''Want to have a staring contest? Double or nothing. Two beers or none.''

A stranger takes up the challenge: Brown eyes and blue eyes lock. Seconds pass before the blue eyes finally blink.

As the stranger calls for the barkeep, Mark Tatum sticks out his hand. ''Buddy, you don't owe me nothing. I don't have eyes. Just imposters.''

Tatum removes his ball cap, turns his profile toward the light, and points out the outline of his prosthesis, a mask with eyes made from acrylic, eyelashes and eyebrows made from real hair and a nose made from silicone.

''I'm the man without a face,'' Mark tells the stranger. ''Don't let my false face bother you, 'cause it sure don't bother me.''

And it doesn't this night.

Don't bet against him

Mark had been fueled by one of the few pitchers of beer he's drunk since his surgeons at University Hospital in Louisville excavated the midsection of his face almost three years ago.

His doctors say he should have died then. That he didn't was a medical miracle.

Mark's remarkable odyssey began Feb. 6, 2000. After working in his yard all day with his master gardener wife, he went to bed with a severe headache. The next morning when the headache worsened, Nancy took him to a hospital in nearby Owensboro, Ky.

Mark was confused and faint and dark spots had begun to show up on his face.

An infectious disease doctor there made the diagnosis of mucormycosis and began treating Mark with one of the few drugs that combats the infection.

Initially, the Owensboro doctors told Nancy that there was no way Mark could live.

In despair, she went outside, kicked a concrete bench and broke a toe.

Eventually the doctors told Mark that he had one of two choices: risk a radical surgery at University Hospital in Louisville, where he would most likely lose his face, or go home with hospice care to die.

Nancy and Mark believed they had only one choice, in Mark's words, ''to fight like hell.''

Most people don't survive mucormycosis, an infection caused by everyday fungi found in the likes of moldy bread, spoiled food, the soil and dust.

The disease doesn't occur in healthy people. Mark had been taking steroids for a back injury and believes the steroids had compromised his immune system, leaving him susceptible to the disease.

A week after his diagnosis, an ambulance rushed Mark to Louisville while Nancy rushed home, tossed a few personal items into a bag and raced to University Hospital.

She arrived to say goodbye to Mark just a minute before he was wheeled into surgery.

''I was prepared to never see Mark again,'' she says. ''The doctors didn't even believe Mark would survive the ride from Owensboro to Louisville, much less the surgery.''

Mark's initial surgery, when the surgeons excavated the midsection of his face, took only three to four hours.

''His doctors told me it was one of the most extensive surgeries they'd ever performed on a person's face,'' Nancy says.

It was a week later before Nancy was allowed to see Mark's wound.

''When I went into the critical-care unit, a doctor stood on each side of me and a doctor stood behind me with a chair. They expected me to faint, but when I looked at my husband, I just saw Mark.

''I looked into the cavity on his face. . . . I saw the lining of his brain and the top of his tongue, but I know Mark is more than his face. He is my husband, the man who gave me everything I had ever wanted. I don't mean material things. I mean cuddles and kisses and compliments, the ingredients of a good marriage.

''During those long days and nights outside the CCU, I promised myself that if Mark lived, and it was 'if' for a long, long time, I would tend to him like he would have tended to me.''

Paw-Paw's tears

What sustained Nancy during the nearly three months she camped out at the hospital was the belief she had in the strength of Mark's resolve to live.

''Whatever he ever did, he did twice as well as anybody else,'' she says.

He had worked three and sometimes four jobs — as a security guard, as a bouncer, as a landscaper and as a pole barn builder — so the couple could make a down payment on a home.

He was the man who cooked her meals.

He was the man who doted on his young granddaughter, Leah, the child of Mark's son Thomas by a previous marriage.

Leah accepts Mark's deformity unconditionally: ''Paw-Paw, I love you s-o-o-o very, very, very much,'' she said on a recent visit with Mark and Nancy. ''Paw-Paw, I love you t-o-o much.''

When Leah wiggled out of his arms, Mark's shoulders shook. Whimpering sounds emanated from somewhere deep within. He has no tear ducts; he was crying a tearless cry.

''I cry from the heart,'' Mark says. ''I don't ask God for my eyes back, I don't ask God for my nose back. . .. I don't ask God for my face back. I just wish He would let me have my tears back. Sometimes I need a good cry to get the frustrations out. . . . I once believed that a real man didn't cry. But since mucormycosis, I'm a more mellow Mark.''

Mark believes he contracted the fungi that causes the disease here in his home in the hollow. On the Christmas just before he became so very sick, his water heater burst. He waded through water night and day trying to dry the house out. He believes that the fungi were either in that water or that water caused the fungi to grow, though he knows there never will be a definitive answer.

Mark and Nancy didn't have the money to get the house treated for mold, but Nancy tackled some of the work herself.

With the help of an uncle, she tore up the carpet and she tore out her living room floor where the mold appeared more concentrated.

She even laid new flooring.

''I used Mark's hammer, the one he used on the pole barns,'' she says, laughing. ''I've got more muscle than Mark does now, don't I, honey.''

Mark doesn't have much muscle. In January 2001, he suffered a major stroke that left his right leg partially paralyzed. He also needs his left hip replaced.

''There are days I can't even get up out of my chair to get in bed,'' he says.

Worse, though, are the dark days when he sits in his chair, aching to work again, wishing Nancy didn't have to work so hard, wishing his friends would stop by.

One buddy, Danny Grigsby, hardly misses a day without talking to Mark.

Grigsby even took Mark deer hunting last fall, directing his walker around logs and limbs in the woods.

''I picked Mark up,'' Grigsby says, and I told him, 'Man, in all that camouflage, you look just like Elmer Fudd. You'll scare all the deer away'. I haven't seen Mark so happy since the day he married Nancy.''

A boy and his dreams

Mark grew up a rough-riding country boy in Auburn, Ky. He hunted and fished and chased the girls. The basketball coach at his high school wouldn't let him play on the team unless he cut his shoulder-length hair.

Mark clung to his hair then with the same tenacity that he later clung to his life. While his friends were scoring points on the basketball court, Mark was working as a busboy, pocketing the money to buy a car.

Finally, he bought the car of his dreams, a '56 Ford paneled truck that had been used by a dry-cleaning business.

''I souped it up,'' Mark says. ''Boy, could it run. . . . I treated it like a baby.''

Mark kept the truck until 11 years ago, when he decided to propose to Nancy.

A man who had wanted the truck offered Mark a gold wedding band and a gold engagement ring in exchange for it.

His love for Nancy won out over his wheels. The couple was married June 8, 1991.

In all their years together, Nancy says Mark has hurt her badly only once.

When the doctors in Louisville brought Mark out of a two-month, drug-induced coma they'd kept him in because of the pain in his face following several surgeries, Mark didn't know Nancy. He kept writing notes to his sister on the chalkboard he used to communicate, asking about Susan, his ex-wife.

He was disoriented, Nancy says. Otherwise, she jokes, ''I might have shot him.''

His heart, her eyes

Before his world faded to black, Mark told all his friends, his co-workers and Nancy that she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

''Nancy,'' he says, ''will get old. But I will always picture her as she is, beautiful and bright. But I will always wonder what Leah grows up to look like. . . . She was just baby fat when I lost my sight.''

Nancy assures Mark she won't allow him to miss much.

''I'll always be your eyes, honey,'' she says.

She is, morning, noon and night. She describes to Mark the highlights in Leah's hair. She tells him the depth of the snow outside their door. She alerts him to the new double-wide up the road.

Nancy's more than Mark's eyes. She's his 24-hour caregiver, getting up to guide him to the bathroom in the middle of the night, cleaning his facial cavity twice a day, administering his many medications to help prevent another stroke, to keep him pain-free, to settle his stomach, to lower his cholesterol, to fight his depression.

She is Mark's hands, too. She cuts his meat, she braids his hair, she ties his shoes.

She's also his feet. When Mark wants to walk but can't lift his right foot, she slips her right foot under his, using her foot to force his up, step after step.

She even calls the play-by-play when she and Mark watch Mark's beloved University of Louisville Cardinals on television.

She got to rest her voice this past December, when the Cardinals played Furman at Freedom Hall in Louisville. She and Mark were guests of Cardinals basketball coach Rick Pitino. The coach saw to it that Mark had a professional announcer at his side.

Of all the celebrities and politicos who have saluted Mark, Mark returns his No. 1 salute to Pitino; his No. 2 salute to Bill Clinton, who recently sent Mark a hand-written letter after he had read a story about him in GQ.

Mark keeps Clinton's letter in a frame. He keeps Rick Pitino's picture closer by — in his wallet.

Before Mark's first prosthesis was made, the cosmetic surgeon asked him to bring a picture of himself taken before he contracted mucormycosis so the surgeon could construct a face that would look as much like Mark as possible.

Instead, Mark brought a picture of Pitino.

''That's my wonderful, crazy husband,'' Nancy says, laughing. ''I vetoed Coach Pitino's face. . . . I told Mark I didn't marry Rick Pitino, I married Mark Eric Tatum.''

And she did. In sickness and in health.

Sylvia Slaughter writes for The Tennessean. Reach her at 259-8053 or at sslaughter@tennessean.com.