Honey, I’m a Monster

Kathleen Watt

In the spring of 1997, in the third glorious year of my affiliation with the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, a savage cancer appeared in my cheekbone. The surgeries that saved my life left me with an acquired facial deformity, which required almost ten years and some thirty surgeries to stabilize, along with a significant psycho-emotional adjustment. But, as I discovered early in my protracted hospital tenure, I already had within me the resources I would need to fortify me for the duration.

Any ordinary day in the hospital presents a constant stream of potential offenses, and opportunity to trespass personal boundaries. One day in the wide-open multibed recovery room, subdivided by wavy walls of striped muslin, as I lay half-reclining in a disoriented haze, one low, confidential sentence rose to my ears above the racket of skittering curtain hooks.

 “Honey, I’m a monster. . .”

I looked over to see the silhouette of a tall figure backlit by a fluorescent bed lamp, half-hidden by the partitions between his cubicle and mine. He cupped the mouthpiece of a hospital phone close to his face, but I heard it—hollow-throated, suppressed, breaking into a dry sob. His long torso buckled on the thin edge of his hospital bed. 

My eyes stung with his complaint, knowing neither the extent of his deformity nor to whom he spoke. Then I remembered my own disfigurement. And I had the time to lie there thinking about it.

When a patient loses his face to a predator like the Big C, he may feel prey to the surgeon’s blade himself, even as the blade saves his life with a deft slice at his tumor—the tumor, and any features in the way.

What’s left of me now? he may think. Who am I anymore? Or. . .

I might as well be dead.

Psychologist Nichola Rumsey OBE, founder of the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of West England, Bristol, writes, “Disfigurement [is] initially a sort of bereavement, followed by a tremendous, almost overpowering, sense of inadequacy and isolation.”

​The battle for life may be waged in the craniofacial OR but not won in any conclusive sense. It continues into the tracheostomy ward, where the challenge is to rally patients like us, rescued from the brink of death, to take up devastated lives most of us are woefully unprepared to face. All that can be done has been done, and we’re now disease-free. We’re “ugly.” But no longer dying. Just ugly. Ugly for life.

 As the drama of the life-or-death crisis subsides with recovery, the disease-free patient’s road back is not only grueling but also lonely. For scant prior experience prepares a patient to face what memoirist Lucy Grealy described as “the deep bottomless grief. . . called ugliness.” 

​People fall apart in lots of ways, but when the wreckage is in the face, restoration to any meaningful aliveness depends as much upon a surgeon’s shamanistic insights, and the quality of adjunct services, as upon mere scalpel and stitch.

​“The disfigured face is the most public of all faces. . . always on display. . . [such that] disfigurement may come to define a person’s whole existence and persona,” writes neurophysiologist Cole. It is no comfort to know psychologists study disfigurement under a clinical entity called the “Quasimodo Complex.” Quasimodo, the deeply empathic Hunchback of Notre Dame, of whom Victor Hugo wrote there is “nowhere on Earth a more grotesque creature.”​

The human predilection for pleasing harmonies—even as experience everywhere veers toward disharmony—is universal, and not unique to our own exhibitionist era. Thus, from the Golden Age of Greece to the Golden Age of Hollywood, beauty is virtue by equivalence. From Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man to the Cosmo cover girl to social media—physical beauty, in the shape of its times, signifies to all what is “good” and devoutly to be wished.

​In the United States of the Gay Nineties, for example, there arose an architectural reform movement called the “City Beautiful” proposing to advance moral and civic virtue through municipal planning and urban beautification. Accordingly, many American cities also passed “ugly laws,” some of which remained on the books through the Nixon administration: “Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting presence. . . shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view.” More magnanimous municipalities designated discreet areas of color-coded blue benches for any such persons who might wish to take the air. 

​The archetypes by which we measure each other and ourselves have deep roots which do not die back within mere decades of disability theory or adventurist portraiture. Even in 2005, The New York Times could cite Canadian research concluding that “parents take better care of pretty children than they do of ugly ones.” The same NYT article quotes a churlish scientist spinning outdated Darwinisms: “There are a lot of things that make a person more valuable, and physical attractiveness may be one of them.”

Long after surgical improvements, one facially deformed man reported, “I find myself so unattractive that I feel I should not be mixing with others. I feel as if I am letting [them] down. I get nervous, and that makes [them] nervous. I give out bad vibes.”​

​For a time after my own cancer surgeries, I felt as bereft of my identity as I was of my voice. I could scribble my needs, issuing updates from behind my mask of stitches and Steri-Strips, but my face was unable to deliver the myriad mini-movements that orchestrate our words, giving them life, personal meaning, identity. And I missed seeing my reflection in the faces of others. I began to lose track of my own subtexts, and myself.​

 Of course any mask fundamentally fulfills some proprietary etiquette, hackneyed commonplace though it may be. Come on, smile! This smarmy tip from chirping men has hounded women forever, an indictment and a veiled rebuke, however innocuous. Sadly, my neutral expression has always been an unladylike glower, moody, preoccupied. Disqualifying. Shaplier brows would fix me, I thought, as I sprang for my first tweezer at thirteen. Come on, smile! It can’t be that bad! That disarming comeuppance, always surprising, undermining, infantilizing.

In Bodily Charm, authors Linda and Michael Hutcheon write about the corporeal aspects of operatic singing: “Singing not only demands top physical condition but also top psychological condition. . . . The psychic state of the singer onstage, open to intense public scrutiny and competition, [is] of crucial importance. . .  [and] that psychological state often has physical manifestations.”

When I sang the role of Sieglinde in the American provinces, I applied myself to the role with all my might. The love scene, the mad scene, the shadowed Norse gestalt. I was totally into it. My naturalistic performance moved one influential critic to opine: “[This soprano] is a beautiful woman, but she kept making awful faces, perhaps for vocal/technical reasons, perhaps for inappropriately exaggerated acting ones.”

I read the review in the morning paper while strap-hanging to my day job as a bank teller, as every neck on the train craned to watch my world implode. It was all I could do not to wrap my burning face in the Boston Globe.

Within days, that review was answered by a personal letter from a Wagnerite who knew me only by my performance: “The critic’s remarks remind me of my wife’s father, who tells her she is not very attractive when she is angry.”

Many years earlier, my own father had scalded me with the same reproach. But in an instant, this nosegay from a stranger soothed not only my performer’s ego, but my old wound as well. When my tears spilled onto the page, I discovered how long I’d been craving redress.

Of the mad scene she watched from the pit, a violinist in the orchestra said to me, “I don’t understand German, but when my aunt began to hallucinate with her dementia, she looked exactly like you up there. So I figured. . .”

The opera company contract called for a second round of performances in New York City. I had less than a week to pull myself together and reprise my role where the stakes would be even higher. Mere days to hurt, heal, and reclaim my battered self-image. To relearn to love my face—the organ of my expression. I had to know what I knew and be who I was, “awful,” “inappropriate,” or “exaggerated.” To follow through as I was, I would have to locate a definition of beauty for myself, to ferry me forward, whatever storms may howl.

My New York performance was rewarded with a round of soul-soothing huzzahs, and at least one critic found my Sieglinde “best of all.”

Now lying abed under a welter of tubes and heavy dressings, my face an unsightly mash-up of what it used to be and was yet to become, under the weight of the neighbor patient’s sorrow and my own, something gentler surfaced. Nothing substantial. Only a little something to hold onto, a bobbing float in the chop. Simply a sense that we are not monsters. No matter what we read in the papers.  

Adapted from REARRANGED: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed by Kathleen Watt. © 2023 Kathleen Watt. Published by Heliotrope Books. All rights reserved.

Kathleen Watt sang principal roles with Boston Lyric Opera, Utah Opera Company, Springfield Regional Opera, and others, and in the Extra Chorus of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, before her singing career was summarily ended by osteogenic sarcoma (bone cancer) in her face.

Since retiring from performing, she has written frequently on performing arts and cultural issues, including features, profiles, and essays. As a writer and cancer survivor, Kathleen has collaborated with doctors and artists on a range of projects, including an appearance on a BBC-4 series about facial disfigurement.

Formerly an assistant art director in publishing, Kathleen attended Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and Brigham Young University (earning a double BFA), with postgraduate studies in opera performance at Boston University.

Kathleen now writes from a windswept hay farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where she resides with her partner, ten chickens, three dogs, and on occasion, her two grown stepchildren.