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

At Brooke, Mikeworth endured about 16 surgeries, many on the lower right arm that he almost lost in the blast.

He had skin grafted from his thighs for arm and knee burns. A bone graft from his skull for his cheek. And titanium pins inserted around his eyes and cheekbones.

Within three months, he asked to return to his unit, the 603rd Transportation Co., even though he could barely walk. "I think that was kind of denial," Dea says. "He wanted it to be over, he wanted to be a regular soldier again."

The Army later recommended he retire -- he's classified having an 80 percent disability -- but Mikeworth was insistent. His attitude, Gustafson says, was "I'm staying in the military with or without a nose, with or without an eye."

But reconstructive facial surgery at Brooke proved to be slow going.

"It felt like my entire life and career were on hold," Mikeworth says. "It just seemed ... I'd always be a patient."

Gustafson tried to boost his spirits with daily phone calls.

"You are a soldier," she'd tell him. "You are NOT going to give up. You're going to continue to fight." She reminded him of what he'd been through. "You WILL get over it," she said.

In the fall of 2007, Gustafson heard about a pilot program at UCLA called "Operation Mend." Mikeworth seemed an ideal candidate.

He flew to California to be evaluated.

"They said they were going to fix me up," he says. "It was a golden opportunity and I knew it."

One of the first people Mikeworth met was Dr. Timothy Miller, UCLA's chief of reconstructive and plastic surgery. Miller knows about the sacrifices of war firsthand.

He earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam and has been known to wear a camouflage hat from those days in the operating room.

When talking about Operation Mend, Miller often recalls a quotation he saw etched above a church door, decades ago, when he was teaching in Italy. It said: "It is the divine right of man to look human."

Once when Miller was giving a speech about the UCLA program, Darron Mikeworth heard him use that phrase -- and something just clicked.

"It's a lesson so plain no one thinks about it," he says. "Everyone wants to look like a human being. You don't know what it is to have your nose there, then it's gone and you have two slits in your face. Complete strangers are wondering things and thinking things about you and you haven't even gotten to a handshake."

Once Mikeworth became an Operation Mend patient, doctors took photos, made measurements and developed a stage-by-stage reconstruction plan.

Starting in January 2008, they began operating about once a month.

For his nose, doctors used a small piece of cartilage grafted from his ear, then tucked it under a flap of skin on the right side of his forehead above his eyebrow. They stored it there -- Mikeworth says it was like stubby little horns -- for about four weeks.