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LaTonya, 34, of Boca Raton, said the incident has had a serious effect on her self-esteem.
“I wear a headpiece to cover [the ear] so no one can see it. I felt like a freak show,” said the mother of 13-year-old and one-year-old, pointing to a scar on her right cheek and right index finger where her husband bit her.
“I used to feel pretty, but I just don’t anymore.”
In addition to her self-consciousness, LaTonya says she and her teenage son live in constant fear, wondering if Perry “will come back to finish the job.”
He is currently on house arrest until a June 28th court date.
“I’m constantly having to look under cars and bushes and all that,” she said. “It’s been very hard.”
LaTonya said she had just dropped her son off at school last September and came home to find her husband packing his belongings. The couple began to argue, and that’s when she says Perry became violent.
When the ambulance rushed her to West Boca Medical Center, LaTonya said she was hoping doctors would be able to reattach her ear. But because human bite wounds are often very infected, doctors said they feared reattaching the missing piece might infect the rest of LaTonya’s ear.
“After they told me they weren’t going to be able to reattach it, I was afraid that I wasn’t going to be me anymore,” said LaTonya. “I just thought I was going to have to look like this for the rest of my life.”
Fortunately, Ress, a local expert in reconstructive and plastic surgery, was on call at the hospital the night LaTonya was brought in. After cleaning and stitching up her wounds, Ress told LaTonya about a rare and delicate ear reconstructive surgery that he believed could help her.
And because LaTonya had lost her medical insurance after the divorce, Ress said he would perform the $20,000 surgery pro-bono.
“LaTonya has obviously been through a very tough period in her life and part of the process it’s been nice seeing her grow and adapt,” said Ress. “This is one of the most gratifying parts of my work to help people look and feel their best so they can function at their best.”
Ress, who frequents third world countries like Bolivia to perform pro bono reconstructive surgery on children with birth defects, said the ear surgery the most artistically demanding plastic surgery there is.
“It requires creating a perfect sculpture from the patient’s rib cartilage by carving and grafting it under the skin to create a new ear for her.”
The rare procedure is what Ress said first got him interested in plastic surgery. He was trained by Dr. Burt Brent, a world experiment in ear reconstructive surgery.
“It makes me very motivated to do a good job for LaTonya and I know that this will help getting her back to looking normal and not having her be self-conscious,” he said.
LaTonya says she “feels blessed” that Ress came into her life, but says she still has a long way to go with her emotional recovery. Since the incident, she has worked with Aid to Victims of Domestic Violence to help her family relocate and plans to follow-up with counseling.
The Leader in Local News ©1998-2002 The Boca Raton News
Woman finds abuse can hit close to home
By Carolyn Susman,
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2004
It took the loss of her ear to convince Latonya Heard that she should have listened.
Heard, 34, underwent reconstructive surgery on her ear last week after it was bitten off by her husband in a violent argument several months ago. Perry Heard, from whom she's now separated, has been charged with aggravated battery.
The couple had been married a year and half, and Latonya Heard said there had never been any violence between them. But Perry had told that her domestic violence contributed to the end of his first marriage, and Brevard County Court records show that in August 2000 he was prosecuted for battery on his then-wife, Tracy Heard.
Though Perry Heard hasn't had his day in court -- the trial is in June -- Latonya wants to warn women that any signs of physical abuse in a previous relationship should give a woman a "heads-up."
She has since filed for divorce.
The severe disfiguration that Latonya suffered landed her in the emergency room of Boca Raton Community Hospital, where Dr. Andrew Ress, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, happened to be on duty. He tended to her open, bloody wound that became "horribly infected," he said, because it was a human bite. The entire outer part of her ear was affected. Fortunately, her hearing wasn't.
He followed up with the $20,000 reconstructive surgery Thursday, at no cost to her, because he felt an obligation to treat her, he said, and she didn't have acceptable medical coverage.
"Ear reconstruction is a particular interest of mine. She's a nice person, and this is something I enjoy doing," Ress said.
The operation, which lasted about four hours, involved grafting cartilage from Latonya's rib to replace the missing fleshy part of the ear.
It was a "very unusual" procedure, one Ross has done about five times in his 15-year surgical career.
Heard will have a final skin graft in a couple of weeks.
She has been struggling with her self-esteem since the injury, and she took to wearing a wig with a headband that covered the disfigured ear.
"I used to think I was a pretty person," she said before the surgery. "Now I feel like a freak show when I go out and am seeing people pointing at me and saying, 'What's wrong with her ear? How did that happen?' I still have a ways to go emotionally."
She says she has learned from this experience.
"I'll be much more careful. I have a relative who is a police officer. He said, 'Let me meet (the next one). I'll run their names (through law enforcement records).' There were no signs this would happen."
But this is what other people say they could do for her. How will she protect herself?
"I've never had any abuse. My parents were church-going," she said. "I'm not the kind of person to stand for that. Just don't stay in a relationship (that gets violent)."
Surgery offers victim relief
By Mary Thurman
Yuhas Special Correspondent
July 11, 2004
Domestic violence is something that happens to someone else. At least that's what Latonya Heard thought until that September day when she says her husband bit off the back half of her left ear. "I could just hear the ear being torn away, and I remember saying to myself, `Oh my God, it's coming off,'" she said. That was Sept. 15. On May 27, Boca Raton plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew M. Ress performed the first of two surgeries necessary to reconstruct her ear. The second operation is tentatively scheduled for August, if her wound has healed sufficiently. Heard has no insurance. Ress performed the $20,000 surgery for free. Heard saved the piece of ear, but Ress said it wasn't useable by the time she arrived at West Boca Medical Center's emergency room. "Generally, you can't put it back on because it's so contaminated," he said. "She got an infection and had to be in the hospital several days on antibiotics." Ress has performed this type of surgery five other times. "It's unusual and technically very demanding, literally sculpting a new ear from cartilage," said Ress, 42. Before the surgery, Ress painstakingly measured Heard's ear and spent hours configuring its size and appearance. He drew a template of how the new ear would look. During the four and a half-hour procedure, Ress removed two ribs from the lower front part of Heard's rib cage, which would be used to make the new ear. The front section of human ribs is cartilage, not bone, he said. Using a knife that Ress said looks exactly like an Exacto knife used for carving models, Ress placed the ear template on top of the harvested ribs and sculpted an ear out of them. The longest and trickiest part of the surgery was getting the new ear down to the correct size. "It's exactly like whittling a piece of wood," he said. "It's very easy to screw up. You have to have a mental image of what you're trying to accomplish." Ress created a skin flap behind Heard's neck to make a pocket and placed the new ear inside it and sewed it shut, because the cartilage ear would not survive if it were exposed to air, he said.
In the second surgery, Ress will lift the ear by making an incision that will free it from her head, and the ear will project out normally. Then he will put a skin graft between the ear and skull to cover the incision. Ress said his patient is doing great. "She's going to have scars on her ribs and her ears, but they will be pretty well disguised," he said. Heard is thrilled about the reconstruction and said that Ress has been kind to her from the moment she met him in the emergency room. "I have a wonderful relationship with my patients, which is why I went in to medicine," he said. Ress's humanitarian efforts extend beyond his patients. He belongs to Operation Smile, a national volunteer organization that provides medical assistance to Third World countries. Marilyn Perlyn, of Boca Raton, who along with her husband, Donald Perlyn, started Operation Smile in Florida in 1997, has high praise for the surgeon. "Dr. Ress is a most caring and compassionate person. He takes the opportunity to give back," she said. Ress said his most memorable experience so far with the group was a Bolivian boy with a cleft palate, a hole in the top of his mouth. In order to swallow, the boy had to run food or water along the side of his mouth or it would come out through his nose. Ress closed the hole with surgery, and the next day the boy leaned his head to one side as he always had so he could swallow. Ress told him he didn't have to do that anymore. "He had the biggest smile," he said. Heard is a 1997 graduate of Lynn University in Boca Raton with 12 years experience in the funeral business. She's looking to go back to work in that industry as she recuperates. But in addition to physical scars, she has emotional ones, too. She has dreams that her husband, Perry Heard Jr., 34, is coming back. "I drive down the road and I cry. I have flashbacks," she said. Her husband was arrested and charged with aggravated battery, according to a report from the State Attorney's Office.
Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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