When a homemade bomb hit his Humvee in 2004, Schofield Barracks soldier Ryan Goede took the brunt of the blast.
“The vehicles we had then had little to no armor, no windows and no doors,” he recalled. “The thing went off and we weren’t prepared for it.”
Of five soldiers in the vehicle, he said, “I took the whole beating. … Everyone else was hunkered down.”
It was the third time Goede had been wounded in Iraq and, as before, the doctors were more concerned about saving his life and limbs than about the shrapnel in his face.
And so for three years the soldier tolerated facial scars — until Monday, when he took advantage of free surgery provided to the war wounded.
“I look a little ridiculous,” Staff Sgt. Goede said with a laugh yesterday after returning to Honolulu from Kahului, Maui, where Dr. Larry Schlesinger took 37 pieces of shrapnel from his face.
“It turned out to be a four-hour case,” the doctor said by telephone. “He had shrapnel all through his face, his eyelids, in his lips, in his ear and one big piece right over his vocal cords just under the skin.”
He also had traumatic “tattoos” — dirt and pebbles implanted in his face, said Schlesinger, who abraded the skin with Hawaiian salt and performed laser surgery.
The plastic surgery was the 17th surgery for Goede, 25, who has three Purple Hearts.
An unexpected source entered the picture to cover the costs: the Iraq Star Foundation, formed by Maggie Lockridge of Rancho Mirage, Calif. Lockridge, a former Kailua resident, nurse and Air Force veteran, started the nonprofit in February after seeing ABC-TV journalist Bob Woodruff’s report about his injuries from a roadside bomb in Iraq.
Operating on donations, her foundation covers costs for aesthetic surgeries for military people and veterans with disfiguring facial wounds. With help from prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Norman Leaf, she has recruited 140 board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeons in 38 states, “all just waiting to help.”
Goede, from Tucson, Ariz., is the 12th patient so far.
“It’s a great opportunity for plastic surgeons to give back to the community and a great opportunity for guys who’ve done something for their country to get made whole again,” Schlesinger said.
Goede heard about Schlesinger from a buddy whose wife works for the plastic surgeon.
Schlesinger said he told Goede, who planned to pay for the surgery, that “I couldn’t accept any money. I have strong feelings about the military. It’s an opportunity for me to give back and help someone who was over there protecting us.”
Maui-based anesthesiologist Dr. Lance Whitney also donated his services.
When he returned to Maui after seeing Goede in Honolulu, an e-mail was waiting for him about the Iraq Star program, Schlesinger said.
He called Lockridge, who said the organization would pay for Goede’s flight, medicines and other costs. “It was kind of serendipitous,” he said.
He also got Surgicare of Hawaii in touch with Lockridge and it has volunteered its facilities for military reconstructive surgery cases, said administrator Karl Klungreseter.
Goede could easily leave the Army on disability — he has four plates in his body and is blind in one eye — but wants to continue his career as a Special Forces medic.
“Basically, it’s my opportunity to give back the care I’ve received,” he said. “Our platoon medic, I owe him my life.”
Organized by the British Association of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons in concert with Medical Emergency Response International, a team of surgical experts were deployed to Haiti following the earthquake which took place on January 12, 2010. The team was landed in country just three days after the catastrophe, and were performing limb-saving surgeries by the 20th of January.
BOTOX is among the top used anti-aging treatments in the world. Last year almost two and a half million people were injected with the fast acting substance in order to achieve a smoother, more youthful appearance.
A shallowing or hollowing appearance of the areas around the cheeks, eyes and temples are some of the most prominent signs of aging. While a variety of procedures are available to counteract these developments, opinions differ substantially on the overall best method of achieving lasting, natural looking results. Doctors often use fillers, fat injections, implants and the like to fill out thinning areas around the face, but results vary as fillers and implants tend to shift and settle in ways that can look less than natural.
Non-surgical cosmetic procedures are out-pacing their surgical counterparts at an increasingly surprising rate. In the year 2000, non-invasive procedures that offered less dramatic but more affordable results accounted for just over a quarter of all cosmetic procedures performed in the United States. That number has risen incredibly in the last ten years, settling at around 90% last year according to a recent study performed by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
The motives to undergo plastic surgery may seem different from culture to culture at first glance, but they’re more similar than might be imagined.
Plastic surgery is enjoying an increasingly comfortable reception in much of the world, a fact that’s attested to by the growing number of patients who undergo cosmetic procedures with each passing year. Last year saw a sharp rise in the number of men committing to plastic surgery, and now a similar rise is being witnessed among an even less likely demographic: children.
Ultherapy, a new type of non-surgical treatment intended to tighten and lift the skin around the face, is gaining credibility and popularity in the realm of cosmetic medicine. The procedure utilizes a special frequency of ultrasound that agitates tissues beneath the outer layer of the skin. This causes those tissues to shrink and contract, tightening the overlying areas.
Dr. Nathan Newman, MD, a renowned cosmetic surgeon in the Beverly Hills area, is continuing to develop his innovative new treatments for scar repair, abnormality correction and cosmetic rejuvenation. His proprietary treatments introduce stem cells carefully harvested from a patient’s own body into the locales of their specific treatment such as the face, neck, or the site of a scar or other unsightly damage. The stem cells are prepared in a fatty solution extracted from the patient’s body which acts as a naturally effective filler. The result is exciting: not only does the fatty filler help to smooth lines and plump hollowed skin, the stem cells also work to rejuvenate old, damaged tissues and restore youthful beauty.