Seuss—and taped it to the contraption. The nurse lifted the cover of the isolette, and Debbie reached down with a finger. The mass was soft. Debbie thought it looked like Jell-O. Debbie and her husband returned to her room, and she climbed into bed. She picked up one of the pictures her husband had given her and covered the mass with her fingers to see what her son should have looked like. He had brown hair and eyes. The temptation is to break ranks during a family portrait, and wave when a neighbor drives by.
Still almost everyone stays in character, Nathan, 9, is a cutup who mugs for the camera. Emily 12, tries to stay dignified. Maggie, the vocal family dog, is uncharacteristically quiet, but David and Debbie are their naturally casual selves. Tim Campbell, a pediatric surgeon known for tackling tough cases, walked into the ICU and peered into the isolette. The boy had a vascular anomaly. They were rare enough, but what this tiny infant had was even rarer. The anomaly was a living mass of blood vessels.
The malformation extended from his ear to his chin. Doctors knew little about such anomalies except that they were made up of fluid-filled cysts and clots that varied in size from microscopic to as big as a fingertip. The mass swelled up from below and wormed its way into his tongue, threatening to block his air passage. He could barely breathe, and only immediate action would save him. He asked a nurse to direct him to the Lightner room.
Behind the Mask - Part 1
He operated a second time to remove bulk above his left ear and to ease his breathing with a tracheotomy tube. Baby Sam, who weighed 5 pounds after the surgeries, spent three months recovering in the hospital. He was 3 when he first realized he was different. His father remembers Sam running up and down a hallway when he stopped in midstride and stared at his image in a full-length mirror. He touched the left side of his face, almost as if to prove to himself that he was in fact that boy in the mirror.
His parents had been expecting this day. His father bent over and took Sam by the hand. He led him to a bedroom off the hall. David lifted Sam onto the bed. And then his parents told the little boy the complicated facts of his life. Except for the deformity, Sam was normal in every way. Bystanders often assumed Sam was retarded. A woman asked Debbie what drugs she had taken during her pregnancy. Others just shook their heads and turned away. His parents went to another surgeon to see if he could reduce the mass. Sam bled for six weeks.
When the Lightners realized their son would have to live with his face, they refused to hide him from the world. They took him to the mall, to the beach, to restaurants. In Northeast Portland, where the Lightner family lived, people talked about seeing a strange-looking boy. The Lightners enrolled Sam in the neighborhood school. Sam, his breathing labored, caused a stir during registration. Teachers worried about having the boy in their classes. But he was an excellent student. He made friends, joined the Cub Scouts and played on a baseball team. He tried basketball for a year, but he fell easily because his head was so heavy.
When Sam turned 12, he told his parents that he wanted to change his face. They took him to Dr.
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What Seyfer saw made him leery. The mass was near vital nerves and blood vessels that surgery could destroy, leaving Sam with a paralyzed face. Hundreds of vessels ran through the deformed tissue, and every incision would cause terrible bleeding. Sam could bleed to death on the operating table.
And so he scheduled Sam for surgery in June A month before he asked a friend, the chairman of the plastic-surgery department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to join him. A week before the surgery, Seyfer and his partner examined Sam one last time. They peered down his throat so they could study the mass without having to make an incision. That afternoon, Seyfer met with Sam and his parents and said he had made an agonizing decision.
The surgery was too risky. In good faith, he could not operate. The news crushed Sam. He realized he had always held out hope that a surgeon would pull him out of the horrible spotlight that targeted him every time he went out in public. Graduation from eighth grade is a big night for Sam—he wins the citizenship award and receives a huge round of applause from the crowd of parents and students. Sam Lightner pedaled his bike as hard as he could, but his family zoomed ahead. His legs ached, and he panted for breath. Even his younger brother could ride his bike farther and longer.
Most days during this spring vacation, Sam wanted to just lie in bed and watch television. And when he spoke, his family kept asking him to repeat himself. He garbled his speech, as if he were speaking with a mouthful of food. At dinner, he sat with his family, listening, picking at his food, waiting to go lie down on the sofa. Over his protests, his mother took him into the bathroom and weighed him. Five pounds, she said. But a later visit to his pediatrician turned up nothing. Sam woke up one morning in pain.
He touched his face and found it tender. The mass was growing. His mother gave him Advil, but the mass continued to swell. He stuck his finger in his throat. His tongue felt bigger. By the end of the week, Sam cried continually. But the pain continued. He found his mother outside, sitting on the front porch.
He walked out and sat next to her, crying. His speech slurred, and he had to repeat himself. The pain, he managed to tell her, had spread across the entire left side of his face. The next morning, at the hospital, nurses poked and probed his face. He sat still while strange machines whirled about his head. And then he waited while specialists reviewed the X-rays and CAT scans.
Doctors admitted him and ran more tests. Four days later, on Aug. With his fingers, he reached up. His swollen tongue stuck several inches out of his mouth. He punched the button beside his pillow to call for help. Then the door to his room opened, and a new doctor walked in. The man asked Sam if he knew him. Sam shook his head. The boy weighed 65 pounds—he was wasting away. He stops in the door frame leading to the kitchen and melts into the late-afternoon shadows.
She bends her head toward him, about to speak. He cuts her off. The boy slips behind his mother and steps into a pool of light. A huge mass of flesh balloons out from the left side of his face. Sam Lightner at a meeting of his Boy Scout troop. He must imagine what he looks like. Into a place where nothing is worse than being different. The next morning, at the ultrasound lab, the technician got right to work.
He immediately ruled out twins. And he's a one off. I didn't realise how important his voice was to him until he got throat cancer. In the short term it was the thought of losing his voice that really upset him. I found radiation therapy to be pretty tough going, and others I've talked to say it's pretty tough, but, you know, very much worth it.
I've been very spoiled by my supportive children, and my sister Colleen's come over. In many ways this last 12 months has been a very good 12 months. Another great learning experience. And um, yeah, far more good than bad out of this.
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He's still a mystery to me in many ways. He's very private, so even when he loves you and is close to you, you don't necessarily know always what's going on inside of him. We know he loves his family and we know that he's always been determined to prove himself. Dad's a curious character to me and that's coming from someone that's probably one of his closest confidants. I don't know what makes him tick. My relationship with my mother got off to a rocky start. I was born with a blockage between my stomach and my bowel and I couldn't take in any of her milk.
My father believed the doctors, that I was going to die that night, so he went to church, and- and prayed, and he offered God a deal, that if he saved my life, that he would usher me into the priesthood, he would offer me as a priest. We were a typical Catholic family. Brought up in the doctrines of the faith, and we practised it religiously. Pardon the pun, but we went to church every Sunday, whether we liked it or not. All the boys were altar boys, so we were very much entrenched within the Catholic church.
I knew he liked this place. It was a Catholic orphanage, as far as I understood. And I couldn't understand why I would be sent to an orphanage. I still don't know why my father thought I needed to toughen up, but I did toughen up. You know, it changed me. I remember him going for the school holidays. Bindoon in that era had just such a fantastic name. The brothers were doing such wonderful things up there with the boys. They were kids from institutions.
They were kids from the streets and they were tough. My first night there four or five kids surrounded me and then one of them punched me, and another one punched me, and I was on the ground. These kids kept getting into me and I was terrified. Every kid there had to have a job. My job, sounds funny, but I was the assistant rabbit trapper. They all ran behind a tree, and I called their names out. I was flicking bullets back into the rifle as fast as I shot them, and I fired a shot into each tree, and called out the name of the kid behind the tree, and somehow, that just seemed normal, in that violent atmosphere that I was exposed to, and the fear that I had, that's what I did.
Many, many years later, I discovered that it was almost the epicentre, of, um, child abuse in Australia. It made me lose respect for the brothers. It made me lose respect for the Catholic Church for a long time. Mike came back a little bit tougher from that experience at Bindoon. He did come back different.
Dad was a senator representing Western Australia, and he was away in Canberra a lot of the time. And so Mum on her own was bringing up six kids. It fell to Michael to assist her in managing the family. He would be part of the disciplinarian. I'll never forget the time I went in the garage and got in the family station wagon.
Started it up and sat there revving it until I saw mum, a distraught mum, come running with Michael in tow, and I jumped out of the car and professed my innocence.
Transcript
And Michael whacked me in the mouth. I've never forgotten it, but he made his point. And so I think that's part of the reason why Mike is the way he is. So, he has a toughness about him that you don't see when you see him on television. Dad had a considerable influence on me. He took me to political meetings when I was very young. Michael definitely wanted to be a priest, we all knew that.
So, the girls won out. After school, I had spent one year in the public service, and that was just torture. And then I saw a cadetship in journalism and when I first walked into the Daily News newsroom phones were going and people were running, because I went in there at a time when deadlines were approaching, and before I even had a job, you know, my first job, I thought this is exciting.
I got a job on The Age, and got a lot of opportunities with The Age. I was a police roundsman for The Age, and I'd actually seen him in the reporters room. And even then he had great presence. Rounds was a very wild and woolly place, really. It was part of police headquarters, but you wouldn't have known because there were drinking went on, there was gambling that went on, there were brawling that went on, etcetera.
And I think Mike absorbed the atmosphere, loved the atmosphere of it all. Joan actually came to police rounds a couple of times. She was a Miss Australia, and a very handsome young Mike Willesee. Very charming, very debonair and obviously going places, and they married in I was mad keen on football, and I was okay.
The Girl Behind the Mask Part 1 | Dana Vulin
And I sort of realised that I was caught between journalism and football. He was built to be a good sportsman. He was tall, and he was obviously athletic. And he did play several games in what was called in those days the, South Melbourne Seconds. But he was also, I think, realistic enough to know that while he would've liked to have been a champion footballer, it wasn't going to happen. But he could be a champion journalist. Mike and I started in television together, some 50 years ago on probably the craziest current affairs program there could be invented.
Ah, crazy because This Day Tonight decided to break every rule in the book. This Day Tonight, was just magnificent for me, because the timing was right, it was a bold, brave new program, and I happened to be there at the right time, and in the right place, Canberra. This Day Tonight gave me a flying start. He was a natural. He was serious, but he always had a twinkle in his eye. Um, he could just hold the audience and you knew that here was a guy who was really good at interviewing.
Do you have fears about this appointment? He can cut through the bullshit, he has a wonderful detection meter. And I think his father gave him an appreciation of the practice of politics without necessarily an affection for the execution of it. You know, I was still a kid, in terms of politics, and television, and the prime minister was asking me around for advice. The same time, I saw how he drank, and it was frightening. He was pouring very heavy scotches. And as it transpired, in his prime ministership there were several occasions when his drinking did get the better of him.
Taught me more about drinking than about prime ministership. And as a result of that I went across to Four Corners which was then a very poor rating program. Here is our report. Vietnam was the big story of my era. Suddenly, I was in journalism, I was in the press gallery, and all around me was the Vietnam War. The protest marches, the arguments in the pubs, and I wanted to get to Vietnam. We were both pretty young when we first went, so it was all pretty new, and it was very, very frightening, and exciting, and the power. The Americans, the invasion of the Americans, the machinery, the helicopters.
It was an amazing experience to cover this, as a young man. Between us and the hill is a small Cambodian village. The villagers are frightened; they have no way of knowing they are not the targets. Vietnam was dangerous at times. I have asked myself, am I attracted by the danger? But I think I'm being honest to myself in saying that I'm attracted to the best stories.
Vietnam was the best story of an era. The helicopters are the lions of this jungle — but at a price. The Americans have lost nearly 2, Then pick up the camera, slate, and away he would go. He just, not just the words, but the presence. He was very, very natural. There was none of this thing, that we can get carried away with in television, of ego or presentation, it was just the way he was.
To cover it well, you had to go to dangerous situations. A lot of journalists didn't and I would even question myself about, because it was usually my decision to go to a certain place, and I was taking a camera crew with me, was I being fair to them? Fortunately, nobody got hurt where I was, but quite a few of my friends were killed. The adrenalin would get going, and then, after we got it all done, he'd just sit, have a drink, maybe, or not, and maybe a cigar. He did like his own company, and he'd be in his own thoughts.