An elderly couple were driving through County Kerry, Ireland. Irene was driving when she got pulled over by the police, who asks her, 'Ma'am did you know that you were speeding?' Irene turns to her husband, Mick and enquires, 'What did he say?' Mick yells out, 'He says you were speeding!' The policeman said, 'May I see your license, please ma'am?' Irene, once again, turns to Mick and says, 'What did he say?' Once more, Mick, shouts out, 'He wants to see your license!' Irene gives the policeman her driving license. The cop retorts, 'I see you are from Kerry. I spent some time there once and had the worst date I have ever had.' For the final time, Irene turns to Mick and asks, 'What did he say?' Mick yells very loudly, 'He thinks he knows you!'
Chrissy Steltz holds her 2-month-old son, Geoffrey Dilger Jr., in her Milwaukie apartment.
If her six-hour surgery goes as planned, Chrissy Steltz will wake up able to breathe through a nasal airway for the first time in more than 10 years.
She won't yet have a nose -- just a rectangular opening where the nose should be. But it's a start.
An accidental shotgun blast at close range when she was 16 blew away much of Steltz's face, including her eyes, cheeks, nose and upper jaw. The first page of her 725-page medical record at Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Medical Center in 1999 gives a stark summary, under Reason for Admission: "Most of face gone."
The surgery begins a new medical effort to give Steltz a new face. It will take months, possibly a year. The ultimate goal is to fashion a realistic silicone mask -- with glass eyes, fake lashes and lids, a breathing nose and cheeks -- that Steltz will wear over her ruined face.
That prosthesis will snap into place, attached to eight titanium dental implants that doctors will drill into her facial bones in three months. She plans to wear the prosthesis most of the time, removing it for daily cleaning. In public, she'll also wear tinted glasses, to camouflage the inability of her eyes to move.
The rare total mid-face reconstruction is a collaboration of teams led by Dr. Eric Dierks, a Portland maxillofacial surgeon who specializes in treating trauma and cancer patients, and Larry Over, a Eugene dentist and prosthodontist.
The prosthesis will replace the black nylon sleep shade Steltz wears now to cover her vacant eye sockets, missing nose and heavily scarred face. But that won't come until next year.
First, Dierks must cut a hole in the skin graft where her nose used to be.
The sideways, point-blank blast from a 12-gauge shotgun entered just below her right eye and exited her left temple.
It was March 21, 1999, a Sunday evening. About a dozen teenagers had gathered to party in the Southeast Portland apartment where Steltz lived with her boyfriend. She was an A-minus student at Franklin High School. Her mother let her move in with the boyfriend as long as she kept her grades up.
One of the teenagers found the shotgun under a couch in the laundry room. He was fooling around when it went off.
"Everybody was drinking," Steltz says.
Police investigators called the shooting accidental. The 18-year-old who fired the gun was sentenced to 27 months in prison for second-degree assault. Steltz's boyfriend, also 18, was given probation for theft of 15 guns, including the one that nearly killed her.
She spent six weeks in the hospital, mostly in the intensive care unit -- on a respirator, her jaws wired shut, a feeding tube in her abdomen. She had more than a dozen surgeries. The record of her in-hospital medications runs 129 pages. She remembers nothing from the first 38 days.
"From her upper lip to the hairline was blown away," says Dr. Mark Buehler, an orthopedic surgeon who treated her. "Her nose was gone, her cheeks were gone, her eyes were gone.
"There was nothing there."
Chrissy Steltz, who will undergo the first of three surgeries today to repair her face, does the dishes in her apartment with some help from Rebecca Derscheid, her brother's girlfriend.
The Legacy Emanuel trauma team's priority was to make sure she didn't bleed to death, then stabilize her and close the gaping wound. They used pieces of the fibula, the slender shin bone, as well as metal plates, to make new cheekbones and "bridge" the middle of her face, which they covered with a large "paddle" of skin from her leg.
"It's almost like a jigsaw puzzle inside my head," says Steltz, now 26.
View full sizeRandy L. Rasmussen/The OregonianDr. Eric Dierks will be performing today's surgery to begin building a new face for Chrissy Steltz.The first she remembers is waking up disoriented five weeks later. She didn't realize she was in the hospital or that she'd been shot or even, at first, that she was blind.
Now she refers straight forwardly to the "unfortunate chain of events that changed my life." She says "when I went blind," rather than "when I got shot."
In the decade since, she has settled into what passes for normalcy in the life of a blind woman who wears a black mask. She learned Braille. She worked briefly in a legal office, answering phones, but mostly as a daytime caregiver for her younger sister, Shyanne. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Milwaukie with her partner of seven years, Geoffrey Dilger, who also is blind, and their 2-month-old son, Geoffrey Jr.
Aside from her traumatic injury, Steltz is healthy. The only prescription drug she takes is for headaches. Her short-term memory occasionally plays tricks on her. Her jaws don't open fully, so she can't eat a sandwich without squishing it first. She has no sense of smell. Her voice, paradoxically, will sound less nasal once she has a nose to breathe through.
The only time she can see, Steltz says, is when she dreams.
What she misses most about having sight is the independence and spontaneity. "You can't just randomly take a beach drive," she says. "Nothing is random.
"I had a driver's license for four months and 11 days, and I loved driving."
Steltz has never seen her 10-year-old sister, born four months after the shooting.
"I miss not being able to visually see my sister or my son or my significant other," she says.
Having an infant son provides an extra incentive to get her face rebuilt. She wants little Geoff to know Mom with something besides a deformed face.
"I look at him like I would if he could see my eyes," Steltz says. But instead of eye contact, he gets what she calls "sleep-shade contact." Even if it's a year before she starts wearing her new face, "he'll grow up knowing me that way."
For a patient such as Steltz, the line between cosmetic and functional need blurs.
Steltz is on the Oregon Health Plan, the state's Medicaid program for disabled, blind and low-income residents. That plan probably won't cover most of the cost of her facial reconstruction, including the prosthesis, because it is considered cosmetic.
Surgeon Dierks and prosthodontist Over agreed to absorb the uncovered costs. Zimmer Dental Inc. will donate the implants, which run about $2,100 apiece.
Breathing through her nose as well as her mouth, Dierks says, will help improve Steltz's sleep, keep her sinuses from drying out and prevent sleep apnea -- interruptions of breathing -- as she ages.
"It's not like I hit an age where, say, I got wrinkles and want to go have some laser surgery done," she says. "This is something that just needs to be done so I can walk around and actually feel comfortable with everybody else in public.
"I would like to look like what I used to look like." The last time she saw herself in a mirror, she was 16. View full sizeRandy L. Rasmussen/The OregonianChrissy Steltz, who will undergo the first of three surgeries today to repair her face, does the dishes in her apartment with some help from Rebecca Derscheid, her brother's girlfriend.Steltz's face will be rebuilt in three phases.
Today, Dierks will make an N-shaped incision in the middle of her face, creating two flaps of skin. One will fold in to form the "roof" and the other the "floor" of her new nasal passageway. The opening must be larger than normal, because scar tissue will shrink it over time.
Dierks also will straighten and trim the piece of leg bone that bridges her face from cheekbone to cheekbone and cut away other scar tissue.
In about three months, after that surgery heals, he will set eight dental implants into Steltz's face -- to secure the prosthesis that Over will assemble. It takes at least four months for the implants to fuse with the bone.
Then they'll fit the prosthesis to her face.
"We want to make it comfortable and durable enough so she can put on what is basically, for us, a Halloween mask, and wear that all day long," Dierks says.
The team of surgeons and nurses in the operating room at Emanuel today "will probably not see a case quite like this again," Dierks says. In his 25-year surgical career, he has performed hundreds of facial reconstructions but "nothing this big."
Still, it's not a face transplant. When doctors at the Cleveland Clinic performed the first face transplant in the United States last December, they removed a face and its blood supply from a brain-dead donor and grafted it onto a 46-year-old woman. Like Steltz, the woman had been horribly disfigured by a shotgun blast, but the injury also left her in severe pain and unable to speak clearly or swallow easily.
Steltz's injury is not life-threatening. A face transplant would entail much higher risk -- and expense -- than her prosthesis. It would require her to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life, at a cost of more than $1,000 a month. Suppressing her immunity would expose her to further risk of infection and disease.
"A face transplant would still not give her seeing eyes, nor would it give her mobile eyelids and lashes," Dierks says. "There's no way we can return that to her." The prosthesis will look "as good, and debatably better, than a face transplant," he says, even though it won't move.
The best possible outcome after the elaborate handiwork on her face would be for no one except Steltz to notice.
"Hopefully," Dierks says, "a year from now, Chrissy will be able to go to Kmart or Fred Meyer and not have people crane their necks -- (and think) 'What happened to you, lady?'
"I don't think she'll get those stares and comments."
Three Labrador retrievers - chocolate, yellow, and black are sitting in the waiting room at the vet's office when they strike up a conversation. The black lab turns to the chocolate and says, "So why are you here?" The chocolate lab replies, "I'm a pisser. I piss on everything - the sofa,the drapes, the cat, the kids. But the final straw was last night, when I pissed in the middle of my owner's bed." The black lab says, "So what is the vet going to do?" "Gonna give me Prozac," came the reply from the chocolate lab. "All the vets are prescribing it. It works for everything." The black lab then turns to the yellow lab and asks, "Why are you here?" The yellow lab says, "I'm a digger. I dig under fences, dig up flowers and trees, I dig just for the hell of it. When I'm inside, I dig up the carpets.But I went over the line last night when I dug a great big hole in my owner's couch." "So what are they going to do to you?" the black lab inquired. "Looks like Prozac for me too," the dejected yellow lab said. Then the yellow lab turns to the black lab and asks what he's at the vet's office for. I'm a humper," the black lab says. "I'll hump anything. I'll hump the cat, a pillow, the table, fire hydrants, whatever. I want to hump everything I see. Yesterday, my owner had just got out of the shower and was bending down to dry her toes, and I just couldn't help myself I hopped on her back and started humping away." The yellow and chocolate labs exchange a sad glance and say, "So, Prozac for you too, huh?" The black lab says, "No, I'm here to get my nails clipped."
One Sunday morning, the pastor noticed little Michael standing in the foyer of the church staring up at a large plaque. It was covered with names and small American flags mounted on either side of it.
The six-year old had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up, stood beside the little boy..
And said quietly, 'Good morning Michael. Good morning Pastor, he replied, still focused on the plaque. Pastor, what is this?
The pastor said, 'Well son, it's a memorial to all the young men and women who died in the service.
Soberly, they just stood together, staring at the large plaque. Finally, little Michael's voice barely audible and trembling with fear asked
There was a midget down in Texas who complained to his buddy that his testicles ached almost all the time. As he was always complaining about his problem, so his friend finally suggested that he go to the doctor to see what could be done to relieve the problem.
The midget took his advice and went to the doctor and told him what the problem was. The doctor told him to drop his pants and he would have a look. The midget dropped his pants.. The doctor put him up onto the examining table and started to examine him. The doc put one finger under his left testicle and told the midget to turn his head and cough, the usual method to check for hernia.
Aha!" mumbled the doc and putting his finger under the right testicle, he asked the midget to cough again. "Ahhha!" said the doctor and reached for his surgical scissors. Snip, snip, snip, snip, snip, snip on the right side then snip, snip, snip, snip, snip,snip, snip on the left side.
The midget was so scared he was afraid to look, but noted with amazement that the snipping did not hurt. The Doctor then told the midget to pull up his pants to see if they still ached. The midget was absolutely delighted as he walked around the doc's office and discovered his testicles were no longer aching. "Gee, Doc, what did you do?" he asked.
The doc replied, "I cut two inches off the tops of your cowboy boots."
A wonderful legacy is in the making. We only have 3.5 more years before the carnage is over. So, Let's Recap...
1. The American people elect a black president with a total of 142 days experience as a US Senator from the most politically corrupt state in America whose governor is ousted from office. The President's first official act is to order the close of Gitmo and make sure terrorist's civil rights are not violated.. (He screwed up!!)
2.. The U.S. Congress rushes to confirm a black Attorney General, Eric Holder, whose law firm we later find out represents seventeen Gitmo Terrorists. (An honest mistake?!)
3. The CIA Boss appointee, Leon Panetta, has absolutely no experience, has a daughter Linda, we find out, who is a true radical anti-American activist and a supporter of all the Anti-American regimes in the western hemisphere. (There were socioeconomic factors involved!)
4. We got the second most corrupt American woman (Pelosi is #1) as Secretary of State; bought and paid for. (You can put lipstick on a pig, but it still stinks! Sometimes like rotting cans of tuna fish)
5. We got a Tax Cheat for Treasury Secretary who did not properly file his own taxes for 12 years. (He misspoke!)
6. A Commerce Secretary nominee who withdrew due to corruption charges. (Another honest mistake???)
7. A Tax cheat nominee for Chief Performance Officer who withdrew under charges. (Hmmm ... another screw-up?)
8. A Labor Secretary nominee who withdrew under charges of unethical conduct. (OK, maybe this person was just plain stupid.)
9. A Secretary HHS nominee (Daschle) who withdrew under charges of cheating on his taxes. (I'm running out of excuses for these idiots!!)
10. Multiple appointments of former lobbyists after an absolute campaign statement that no lobbyists would be appointed. (This could drive me to drink!)
All this occurred just during the first three weeks....but who's counting?
America is being run by the modern-day Three Stooges; Barry, Harry and Pelosi and they are still trying to define stimulus..."it's spending!!!" (Are you surprised? Clinton couldn't even define the word "is".)
The congress passes the $800,000,000,000 (that's $800 billion) pork-loaded spending bill where the government gives you a smidgen of your tax dollars ($13 per week), making you feel so good about yourself [stimulated], that you want to run out to Walmart and buy a new Chinese-made HDTV and go home and watch Telemundo!
His 32 highly paid czars have backgrounds that you, as an individual, would have absolutely nothing to do with. He gave them these positions to pay them for previous services rendered. Just like good-ole Chicago Dem politics.
Only in America, what a country..... Please, Pray for our country!
Here's the good news though - Obama took Air Force One to Denver to sign the stimulus package, wasting as much as 10,000 gallons of fuel OR 24 JOBS FOR ONE YEAR. Of course what they don't tell you is that he also had to have a C-141 or (sometimes) a C5A cargo plane ferry Marine One (the helicopter) to make the shorter hops to avoid traffic... that's another 20,000 gallons. Then another C-141 plane to ferry the limousine to his staging area for the shorter (non-traffic-conflicting) drive-up photo-op arrival... that's another 10-20,000 gallons... well you do the math. Don't forget that everywhere the limo goes, 4 to 5 armor-plated, 50-caliber machine gun equipped SUVs escort him for security. There are 3 to 5 Secret Service Agents in each SUV. Then he went to Europe and decided to take his family for an "educational" experience for the girls. That means he took Air Force One. The family flew separately and "met him there..." That means Michelle and the girls took the "backup for Air Force One" (identical Boeing 747). This whole wing of the Air Force (same group that flies him everywhere he goes includes one extra 747 this time) hopped around the Mediterranean from Belgium, to Egypt, Turkey, Germany, France, England, and wherever the other countries where that they joined him and he visited, to apologize for America and pledge that we would no longer be a Christian nation. Every place they went, they had to take two 747s, (one for the prez and one for the family), three or more C-141s to ferry the helicopter, the limousine, and four armor-plated SUVs to escort the limo. Note that neither the limo nor any of the armor-plated SUVs is a hybrid. They get about 5-8 MPG. Marine One is also NOT fuel efficient. Everywhere he goes, all of them go (except to Europe where the family did have to take the extra 747). Then they decided to go on vacation to Martha's Vineyard. This time they seemed to be more economical. They only took one 747 and left the limo at home since there were no formal photo ops planned while on a casual vacation. But, of course, the helicopter and SUVs had to go since they were there for a week. That's security. On vacation, they just have to rough it and ride in one of the SUVs. While the first family is "vacationing" in privacy, the standby helicopter and all the SUVs remain out of sight, yet heavily guarded while they remain on the alert awaiting the beckoned-call. That guard detail, just to secure the vehicles and Marine One, is a 24-hour-a-day duty. Trust me, there is more than one man standing there with an M-16. Very likely they mobilized a fair number of the National Guard or state police for that duty. Now if you are a thinking person, and you are trying to figure out the logistics of all this, you may be wondering... if they take Marine One on vacation with them, how do they get from Andrews AFB back to the White House when they arrive back in DC? Easy! Just like Air Force One, there is a backup Marine One helicopter. While the one used on vacation is being dismantled for the return flight... (They have to re-configure the rotor blades to fit the helicopter into a cargo plane.) another one is waiting at Andrews Air Force Base to take them back to the White House when they arrive in DC. [ Backup 747s, backup helicopters, yes, backup limousine, and believe it or not, backup SUVs. They simply can not afford to have a mechanical problem deadline them in the middle of a trip.]
Don't you just love this hypocrite? The automotive executives were expected to sell their aircraft that only made two trips to D.C. He hasn't kept his wing of the Air Force on the ground long enough to do their scheduled maintenance.
Speaking of praying, Obama has now been president for seven months and yet he & wife (first lady) Michelle, the Christian family they claim to be, have not attended church since the inauguration. He must miss Reverend Wright!
In these times 'I'll keep my God, my freedom, my gun and my money. Anyone that supports this insanity can keep "THE CHANGE".
Becky Silverstein says to Jackie Silverstein, "You're going out of town for three days and I have no money. Can you look at the car and possibly see if you can find out what's wrong with it. It keeps stalling!"
Jackie replies, "Take a look on my forehead. Do you see written 'Henry Ford?'"
Becky says, "If you can't look at the car can you at least look at the washing machine? I can't get it to work properly."
Jackie replies, "Becky, take a look on my forehead. Do you see written, 'Mr. Maytag?"
When she asks Jackie to look at the grill that's not working he replies, "Take a look at my forehead, Do you see written George Foreman?"
After three days away he comes into the house to see the washing machine working perfectly. He then goes into the garage and starts the car. The engine purrs pefectly. He then notices steaks on the grill.
He says to Becky, "How did you get all of this fixed? You said you had no money?"
Becky replies, "You know Mr. Rodiguez the handyman. He said he would fix it for me free if either I made love with him or if I made him a good dinner."
Jackie asks, "So what did you cook for him?"
Becky replies, "Jackie, Take a look on my forehead. Do you see written Betty Crocker?"
A Kentucky principal last month screened school surveillance footage showing two teenagers having sex in the lunchroom and provided lurid play-by-play commentary as fellow educators watched the video in his office.
In the wake of a probe of his bizarre behavior, Dave Wilson retired last week as head of Louisville Male High School.
On September 3 Wilson summoned several co-workers to his office. They arrived to find a darkened room with five chairs pointed toward a large white screen. Using a projector connected to his laptop, Wilson, pictured at right, screened a ten-minute video showing the teens having sex the prior afternoon. "Hey, baby, why don't you come over here and grab my pencil," and "It won't take me long, I am like the minute man," were two of Wilson's comments as the video played, according to witnesses. While the pantsless girl, an 11th grade student, sat in the boy's lap, Wilson slowed the video down and remarked that the group could watch it in slow motion or he could speed the clip up and "make him go even faster."
At the video's conclusion, Wilson could be seen approaching the teens. One witness reported that "Wilson and others" had been watching the students in real time, and when they "were finished having sex," Wilson entered the cafeteria to "run the students out of the building."
The school district's probe of Wilson also turned up allegations that he showed up to school events intoxicated and made inappropriate comments to students and staff. In a September 29 letter, Wilson announced his retirement, effective after he had used up his remaining vacation and personal days.
Eric Anderson wanted to do something big when he proposed to his girlfriend, Rachel Clark.
So when he spotted the bus shelter at Sheridan Road and Surf Street with available ad space, he had found the site to declare his love to Clark -- and to commuters on Routes 134, 143, 151 and 156. Most importantly, it's the stop Clark uses most days.
"At first I was afraid it wouldn't be very romantic -- it's a bus station," he said. "But I mentioned it to her sister and my cousin, and they were both excited about it. I had two women who liked it, so I went with it."
Anderson, 25, contacted JCDecaux, which manages the city's bus shelters. The firm typically charges up to $3,000 a month for bus stop ads -- a price out of Anderson's reach. But his request pulled on the heart strings of JCDecaux account executive Sandy Pickett.
"I approached my sales director," Pickett said. "Being a romantic, she said, 'Let's go for it!' "
So the company let Anderson rent the space for one week at a discounted rate, and Wednesday morning, the proposal went up: "Rachel! I love you! Let's be a team forever! Will you marry me? XOXO, Eric." It included symbols of a heart (for love), the scales of justice (she's an attorney), a gear (he's an engineer for Ford Motors) and a knot (as in, let's tie the ...) running down the side.
"I was lost in my own little world," Clark said of arriving at the stop Wednesday. "I marched up to the bus stop, and he was standing behind it. ... He's like, 'Read the sign!' I started giggling and laughing going, 'Yes, yes!' "
As morning commuters ignored the Lakeview couple, Anderson got down on one knee and presented Clark, 28, with a stone passed down in his family for 130 years.
Now, until the sign comes down, Clark gets to relive her proposal each day on her way to work.
"It's kind of cool to have this sort of little secret in the morning," she said. "I want to be like, 'That's me! I'm getting married!' "
