L o b a B l a n c a {dot} c o m

The two faces of Connie Culp

Modern medicine is AMAZING.

I continue to be as awed by these full face transplants as I was when I first heard of Isabelle Dinoire, the first person to undergo this reconstructive surgery.

Now, doctors have successfully performed the first face transplant here in the United States, on Connie Culp. Ms. Culp was severely deformed in 2004 after her husband shot her in the face with a shotgun. The blast obliterated the center of her face, leaving what almost looked like a meteor crater where her nose used to be.

I didn’t place any of the “before” photos here, because…I don’t know. Silly reasons, I suppose. It felt too exploitative (but writing about her on my blog apparently isn’t). but look at these side-by-side shots. Yes, the “new” Ms. Culp is in for a few more surgeries to tighten up some areas and smooth out others, but it’s just…amazing. She has a new outlook and a new face.

This is only the fourth full face transplant ever done, and so far the most comprehensive. Surgeons replaced 80 percent of her face with the donor face. This raises all sorts of questions. She’s 46 years old. For slightly more than 40 of those years, she saw the same face staring back at her in the mirror, and friends and family saw the same face looking at them. Then her total dick of a husband obliterated that person. Or at least the physical representation of that person.

What sort of psychological ramifications come along with these surgeries? What is it like to look into a mirror, knowing that it’s you, but not seeing your own face? How do you process the fact that you’re now looking at a stranger, about whom you knew nothing prior to their untimely death that has now granted you their face? What do you do if you ever encounter someone who knew that stranger?

My mind is abuzz with all sorts of Twilight Zone scenarios and stories, but then I pull back and remind myself that this isn’t some science fiction concept. This is real. Connie Culp has another person’s face and another chance to be as extraordinarily normal as she wants to be.

Like I said before: Modern medicine is AMAZING.

Photo from imagesafari.com

I love Peanuts comics. They’ve been a staple of my geeky life since I was a wee wolf. Even now, part of my morning ritual is to read the daily strip at Snoopy.com before I dive into my Secret Squirrel government work.

This ritual has been a bit derailed for the past few months (actually, it seems like it’s been this way since well before last Christmas). Snoopy.com is closed for upgrades, and so all traffic has been redirected to the Peanuts page of Comics.com. I suppose that’s acceptable, since it allows me to continue to get my daily dose of Chuck & Co. But I miss the official site.

So I thought I’d be sneaky and try other URLs related to Snoopy.com, just to see if maybe there was a way to see what’s going on behind the curtain (hey, it’s worked on other sites; why wouldn’t it work here?). I started with www.snoopy.net. What I got, instead of a sneak peek at the new Peanuts site, was an eyeful of happy.

Seems that a photographer in Ohio has purchased this URL and set it to redirect visitors to his own site, imagesafari. From what I’ve gathered, the photographer in question is Jon Anhold, and he’s been posting online since 2003. In fact, it looks like he started posting 10 days before incite.thought went live. Kismet? I think so.

I know very little about the mechanics of professional photography, but I do recognize what is aesthetically pleasing to my amateur eye. From that perspective, I think Jon’s photos are gorgeous. They’re wonderful compositions with rich, deep colors, beautiful use of natural and artificial lighting, and an ever-present sense of whimsy. The photo I use here is from his site. By no means is this ducky the best of what I saw, but it’s rubber ducky, dammit! He’s so fun…he makes bath time lots of fun…you know the rest, right?

Anyway. He also focuses on subjects that remind me very much of the kind of photos my dad loves to take: landscapes, flora, fauna, machinery, airplanes, cars. There’s a definite sense of comforting familiarity when I look at the pictures at imagesafari. So if you have some free time, I encourage you to go to imagesafari and see for yourself the eyeful of happy that greeted me during my failed attempt at Snoopy.com sneak-a-peekery.