Theresa Saunders, one of my son Mark’s sisters-in-law, was an operating room nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C. One day when she was down here visiting we got to talking and I asked her how work was going. She told me she had just helped fillet a man’s face.
The man had cancer.
She said the surgeon cut down the middle of his face, peeled half of it off and laid it over on his ear. Then he took out some teeth and part of his jaw, wired him back together best he could, and sewed him up.
“How often do you do an operation like that,” I asked.
“Oh, about once a week,” she said. “There are a lot of tobacco chewers in the mountains.”
Postscript: I had chewed tobacco for years, “Red Man,” mostly. Or “Apple.” I quit that day.
Coming Monday: Quincy The Terrible – Part 1
Pat, who can forget the many paper cups full of tobacco spit on your desk at the N&O?