Saving face: Surgery corrects vivid reminders of years of abuse

For years, Deb Dale carried the memory of domestic violence on her face. Every time she looked in the mirror, she saw it in her crooked nose. She felt it in each ragged breath she took, her airways obstructed by the damage from being punched and slapped.

These days, she has a fresh outlook on life. She's breathing easier, living freer and looking better, she says, all because of a program called "Face to Face" and a man named Dr. Steven Mobley, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the University of Utah.

"Face to Face" is a national program run by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, in cooperation with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the umbrella group for most battered-women shelters in the United States. The program screens applicants, then refers them to participating local surgeons like Mobley who have volunteered to repair facial damage at no cost to the patient.

After Mobley met Dale and saw that he could, indeed, help her, he asked the Utah Surgical Center to donate its facility and time for the actual operation. The anesthesiologist also donated his time in what has become a life-altering event for Dale.

The road for Dale from an abusive home life to the operating room has been a long and rocky one.

Dale, 44, was in two abusive relationships. In the first, she says, her husband broke her nose and her jaw. She thought her second marriage was going to be just the opposite, because at first things were really good, she says.

But before long, it, too, became abusive. "With domestic violence you tend to fall right back into it," she says sadly. "You need to remove yourself from the situation for a long period of time."

While Mobley was establishing his medical practice in Utah, Dale was serving time on a charge of "attempted robbery after the fact." Her then-husband stole drugs from a pharmacy.

She says prosecutors never claimed she knew that he was going to steal as she sat outside in the car, but she got in serious trouble because she didn't turn him in afterward, when she learned what he'd done. She was incarcerated for almost a year, then placed on parole, which she has completed.

Incarceration sounds like a bad thing, but Dale believes it helped save her life. First, it put her out of reach of his fists. And she had plenty of time to think about what had become of her life and why she had become a frightened woman who put up with abuse. She didn't like either the answers she found or herself very much.