Autobiography Of A Face

Chapter 1 begins several years earlier, with Lucy, a self-confessed “abysmal athlete” (14), colliding with a schoolmate during a game of dodgeball. Sitting stunned on the floor after the accident, Lucy’s jaw throbs with a “deep and untouchable” (16) pain. However, by the time her teacher comes to check on her, “the sharp ache” has receded and soon Lucy has “forgotten the incident entirely” (17).

Lucy is reminded of the collision that evening, when she notices a toothache that is “worsening steadily” (17). She tells her mother “in the guarded tone [used] to admit the loss or destruction of something valuable” (19). Her mother is angry “at the situation, at the bother, at the possible cost” (18-19) but, having “no way to distinguish such subtle gradations” (19), Lucy assumes that her mother is simply angry with her.

Her father attempts to “dissolve the tension of the situation” by saying the Lucy has “a cold in her tooth” (19) and will be fully recovered in the morning. However, the next day, Lucy can barely open her jaw and is taken to her doctor, who suggests that her jaw is probably fractured. Waiting for an x-ray, Lucy’s mother tells her she is brave and, while her twin sister “would have cried horrendously” (21), Lucy “was courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good” (21).

The x-ray reveals what appears to be a dental cyst and “surgery [is] scheduled for the following day” (21). The operation is unpleasant but seemingly successful, although Lucy has to return for occasional x-rays because “a bony knob had appeared on the very tip of my jaw just under my ear shortly after the initial surgery” (24). She is not concerned by this because she is “vain and proud” about being “different from everyone else” and wants “nothing more than to be special” (25), something that “the role of patient” (25) provides.

Six months after the initial surgery, Lucy comes “home from school with the right side of [her] face swollen and hot” (24). She has to have emergency surgery on what is presumed to be a serious infection and is admitted to the hospital. At this stage, Lucy still feels as though she is “on a great adventure, the star of [her] own television special” (26).

In the hospital, a boy hides under his bed and refuses to come out. Lucy is “deeply embarrassed for the boy” (29). She also recognizes that his behavior goes against her deeply held beliefs that “[o]ne [has] to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (29-30). These beliefs come from her “first visit to the emergency room,” where she had “been praised as good for being brave” which she took as “a formula for gaining acceptance and, [she] believed, love” (30).

When the doctors ask Lucy’s parents about her history, they confer together and Lucy is surprised to see them “act so normal, like the parents of the friends in [her] neighborhood, like parents [she] had seen on TV” (31). Lucy reveals that it is “generally assumed” that they are “not a normal family,” something they “proudly carr[y] and tr[y] to hide at the same time” (31). As Irish immigrants, “neighbors and schoolmates” mock their “different accents” (35). They are also marked as different by “money problems” (35) and several mental-health issues, including her brother’s schizophrenia and her mother’s depression.

Lucy has to stay in the hospital for around two weeks. Her father visits most days but her mother comes less often because she dislikes driving into town. Lucy has tests everyday but it does not occur to her “to ask what [is] going on, what the tests [are] for, what the results [are]” (42). It is not until several years later, when a family member says that something occurred “before Lucy had cancer” (43), that she realizes that her condition, Ewing’s sarcoma, is a lethal.

Despite this, Lucy feels remarkably well and spends a lot of her time misbehaving with Derek, “a handsome boy with a serious case of asthma” (39) who also has to remain on the ward. On one occasion, they sneak into a part of the hospital where animals for medical experiments are kept. Expecting something like a petting zoo, they are horrified by the terrified, tormented animals. When they leave, a “sad, groping presence accompanie[s] [them] all the way back to the ward” (52).

Lucy has had three operations so far but her favorite nurse, Mary, tries to explain to her that, “[t]his is a big operation you’ll have tomorrow, you know that, don’t you?” (54). Lucy, “unaware that I hadn’t a clue how sick I was or what was going happen” (54), casually says that she understands. Mary asks, “Do you know you’ll look different afterward?” (54) and again, Lucy unconcernedly brushes the matter aside.

Although the operation removes half of Lucy’s jaw, after the procedure, she “bizarrely” (56) ends up limping. She also learns that she has had a tracheotomy and can only speak by covering the hole in her throat. She does not drink enough water and grows “lazy about speaking” (57), even after they give her a plug for her trachea. She grows “weaker and weaker” (57) and has to be fed through a gastronasal tube.

Lucy’s mother is “the Visitor Extraordinaire” (58) because, after updating Lucy on her condition “as quickly and simply as possible,” she “spend[s] the entire visit knitting” (58). Lucy appreciates that her mother recognizes that “[h]uman presence is the important part of visiting” (58) and does not feel the need to force conversation or constantly fuss over her. Her father, by contrast, is “the worst visitor” (59) because, after telling her a new terrible pun, he is awkwardly unsure of what to do and will often just “sit down and stare at the drip of [Lucy’s] IV” (59).

After the operation, the swelling is so severe that it hides the fact that Lucy has had half of her jaw removed. As a proud tomboy, she has always “dogmatically scorned any attempts to look pretty or girlish” (62), and so is largely unconcerned about how the operation has affected her appearance. Mostly, she simply feels proud of her “new, dramatic scar and [is] eager to show it off” (62).

The mother of Lucy’s friend, Evan, has “died of cancer several years before” (63), and when his father sees Lucy, he looks at her “steadily and sadly for a minute” (63), before asking her about chemotherapy. Lucy naively reports what she has been told, that it is “simply another drug, another injection” that will leave her “a little flushed, no more” (63).

Evan’s father tries to tell her “about chemical changes in [Lucy’s] body, about how [her] hair might be affected” (63) but, as she had with Mary, Lucy deflects this and “refuse[s] to tackle it” (63). She holds to “the simple belief that nothing bad would ever, could ever happen to” her (67). It is only several years later that she reads the mortality rates for Ewing’s sarcoma and learns that a “reasonable chance of survival was given at five percent” (67).