FROM THE ARCHIVES
Crafting Hope
Prosthetic Sculptor Robert Barron Is Spending His Retirement Giving People New Beginnings
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Sunday, January 12, 2003
The journey of a human soul from dust to dust can be a bumpy ride, and so it's been for Beverly Reighard of the little town of Jersey Shore, Pa.
The extent of Bev's difficulty was summed up last March in an e-mail her husband, Gary, sent to a prosthetic sculptor named Robert Barron in Northern Virginia:
"My wife had cancer in her nose and was cut from her upper lip to above her eyebrows. They took everything between her eyes."
Could Barron, he wondered, remake her face?
For 20 years, Gary Reighard had been Jersey Shore's chief of police. Before that, he'd been a soldier in Korea, a railroad clerk, a baseball umpire. He met Bev in 1969 working as a stock man at the Sylvania plant, where she was packing flashbulbs. She waitressed, too, with Gary's mother at Joe's Seafood House, at the Antlers, and at the Elks Club.
They married in 1971, and by the time Gary retired in 1999 they were ready to relax and do some traveling.
But by the summer of 2000, Bev's nose was swollen and painful and they began a different kind of journey.
Thirty-six weeks of radiation did no good. The tumor got bigger. It ate her nose. It ate parts of her throat, her sinuses. It ate through the roof of her mouth.
When doctors finally operated March 21, 2001, Bev was on the table eight hours and caught hospital pneumonia. She was two months in intensive care, five weeks in rehab.
Then she went home. She couldn't eat. She couldn't talk. She was nearly blind from cataracts that couldn't be treated just then. She was in pain. She had only one thing to hang on to -- Gary. Even though a doctor had urged him not to bring her home, saying he wouldn't be able to bear it, Gary stuck by her every minute of the day and night.
"It was," he recalls, "a low time for both of us. We didn't have no picnic."
In the months that followed, they began navigating the arcane world of reconstructive medicine. A dentist made a prosthetic upper jaw that enabled Bev to eat soft foods after months on tube-fed liquids.
