WORLD> Newsmaker
Injured soldier gets new face, and anonymity
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-26 09:30

When the boys were about to come home after a two-month stay with Dea's parents in Illinois, she tried to prepare them by sending them photos of their injured father. Connor, then 3, studied Darron's obliterated nose and drooping left eye socket, then blithely announced: "Yep, that's my daddy. Where's my mom?"

Once everyone was reunited, the boys brought laughter into the home.

When Mikeworth had to wear round plastic devices called nasal trumpets -- they act like fake nostrils -- they dubbed it his Pig Nose.

When he got a latex wider-than-normal prosthetic nose attached with glue, they dubbed it his Big Nose. One day the glue wore away and the nose fell off while Mikeworth was napping. Their cat, Anastasia, snatched it, with Connor, Ryan and Dea in hot pursuit.

Mikeworth found ways to poke fun at himself, too. When a photographer for a medical journal assured him his privacy would be maintained, the sergeant replied: "Doesn't matter either way. No skin off my nose." Pun intended, most definitely.

But humor was just a temporary distraction.

"When you're without a nose, with burns on your skin, without an eye, it's a hard thing to swallow," says Lisa Gustafson, his former case manager and the Operation Mend coordinator at Brooke. "You've got a family. You're afraid you're going to lose your wife. People in the community are staring at you. You don't know if you have a future, if you have a paycheck. That's pretty scary for a young man. He had a lot of heck of a lot of weight on his shoulders."

Dea tried using tough love. Early on, when Mikeworth confided he felt "useless" and feared he'd never drive again and be able to support his family, she was blunt.

Remember, she said, my father is blind in one eye, he worked all his life, he even played softball with me.

"I was kind of rough on him," she says. "I'm not a person big on self-pity. He needed to hear what I had to say. But he had every right to grieve for what he lost before I kicked him in the butt. I was just too early."

But Dea, Gustafson says, has been "a perfect wife," always at her husband's side.

"We were kids together," Dea explains. "One eye, two eyes, one hand, two hands. It doesn't matter what he looks like. He's Darron."

They met at age 15 when Mikeworth's father retired from the Army, settling in the tiny farming town of Robinson, Ill. From high school to life partners, they are a study in contrasts.

Dea is animated and talkative; Darron is shy and sparing with his words. She doesn't consider much off limits. He zealously guards his privacy. And yet, this ordeal has, not surprisingly, unified them.

"We're both pretty pragmatic people," she says. "Yeah, this sucks. But we need to deal with it and move forward."