He got a good seat, a stool facing the mall’s foot traffic. While his wife got their coffee, he reached for their big Sears shopping bag and placed it on the counter. That way, passers-by wouldn’t see his face.
It worked until one shopper caught a glimpse of the man as he walked past the coffee shop. He stopped, gaped. He returned a few moments later. He stared some more.
Finally, on the third pass, the shopper couldn’t help himself. He walked into the shop for a better look at the man with a hole in the middle of his face, an opening the size of a tennis ball.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“Cancer,” the man without a nose answered.
“How do you keep on going?” the man asked.
Donnie Fritts, who is accustomed to such inquiries, merely smiled. “You just got to keep on going,” he said.
Fritts is going still. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution profiled Fritts two years ago, detailing his fight with an exceedingly rare form of cancer that robbed him of most of his face, and describing his indefatigable faith that has sustained him and his wife, Sharon.
Now, the Calhoun resident has a new face. Surgeons last month attached the hardware into Fritts’ skull on which rests a prosthetic nose, mounted in the middle of flesh-toned plastic that covers his cheeks and blends into his beard. The wiring also supports a new palate.
Friends last month surprised Fritts with a party in the basement of his church. There, amid tears and applause, Fritts did something profound: He sat down and ate — an act that had been difficult for a man without a palate.
He also laughed, prayed and thanked the Almighty for his life.
“I tell you, I’ve been walking on cloud nine,” Fritts said in mid-December. “It’s given me so much confidence.”
Fritts still faces some operations but believes the worst is behind him. He’s probably right: For more than a decade, Fritts has struggled with fear and pain, financial burdens and emotional uncertainty. He’s undergone more than 40 procedures to remove the cancer and rebuild his face. His operations have cost more than $1.4 million, expenses paid by federal disability payments, offerings from friends as well as strangers, and from a fund established by their church.
He’s dealt with disappointment, too. Three years ago, not long after surgeons had first created a framework for Fritts’ nose and palate, his upper lip snapped. Tests showed that an infection had flowered behind his eyes, cutting off the flow of blood to his lip. It died, and Fritts didn’t know. He had to remove the prosthetic nose as well as the palate, then wait for the infection to subside.
Then, a week after his second nose was attached last month, a wire holding the prosthetic broke. “We were heartbroken,” Sharon Fritts said, “and terrified.”
“I said to Sharon, ‘I’m beginning to think God doesn’t want me to have a face,’ ” Fritts said. “It has been a long, hard road, but I’ve had blessings.”
Their troubles began in 2002, when Fritts noticed a bump in his palate. It was hard, no bigger than a BB in the roof of his mouth. Fritts figured it was a small cut — perhaps where a potato chip had sliced the palate’s skin? Surely it would go away.
It did not. A series of tests revealed that Fritts had amelioblastic carcinoma. It’s a rare affliction, documented only a few dozen times. Its causes are unknown, according to the National Organization of Rare Diseases, a nonprofit that tracks unusual diseases. It’s also a killer: Fritts may have survived it longer than anyone.
After they diagnosed it, doctors said Fritts needed treatment, fast. In a 2003 operation, surgeons made incisions atop his head, pulling his face off as if it were a mask. They laid it on his chest. Then they removed his nose and cut a segment of bone from the rear of his skull. They formed a bridge with slivers of skull bone to keep his eyes in place.
When he looked at himself for the first time in a mirror after the operation, Fritts wrote a note to his wife: “You need to leave. Get a life. I’m a dead, dying thing.”
She did not leave — nor, they are convinced, did God desert them.
In the past two years, Fritts has lost 73 pounds due to illness unrelated to his cancer, dropping from a 38-inch waist size to a 32-inch. He also got an umbilical hernia, lengthening his wait for a prosthetic nose and palate.
Still, he remains an optimist. In an interview just before his November operation, Fritts laughed.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people approach me and ask, ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ ” Fritts said.
In late September, the Frittses visited specialists in Maryland and Virginia, taking the final steps before he would be outfitted with a new face. In Maryland, he lay still as technicians covered his face with a green, claylike substance to create a mask of his face. Photos taken at the time show him reclining in a chair, his face covered with the green stuff. He looks like a diminished version of the Incredible Hulk.
Then they visited Robert Barron, who spent decades creating disguises for the CIA. He fashioned the new nose.
Before his operation, Fritts’ profile resembled something an artist had started but left incomplete: a face lacking a nose. Now, Fritts said, that profile is finished. And his new life has begun.
Not long ago, Fritts said, he went to Wal-Mart, just to walk around and see whether he’d attract the stares he got at the mall coffee shop. He passed shopper after shopper; none gave him a second look. He stopped a friend and reintroduced himself; she yelped with delight and gave him a hug.
And not once, Fritts said, did he need a shopping bag to hide behind.
About the Author
