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The face doctor

The face doctor

TIM NOONAN: There's every chance that maybe your attacker might be watching this. What would you want say to them?

ANNETTE CURRAN: I suppose I just want you to know that your selfish act has caused me and my family so much pain and so much distress. I suppose I'll never understand what would possess you to have such little regard for my life but two years on, and I'm still having surgeries, I'm still having physio and I hope that, by seeing this, you'll realise that your selfish act has caused so much pain, not only for me but for my family.

TIM: How often are you putting people's faces back together because of violence?

DR ANTHONY LYNHAM: Every single week. It just goes on and on and on.

TIM: Anthony Lynham is one of Australia's top surgeons. It's not hard to guess he's a Queenslander. Out fishing in a tinny in the mangroves with his son kind of gives the game away.
That, and his laid-back manner.

ANTHONY: At least Dad doesn't have to go anywhere today. Have a nice easy day, Shaun. Yep, yep.

TIM: Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. One block, one city, but it's the same boozy bedlam in every Australian capital every weekend. What happens out here is what ends up on Dr Lynham's operating table.

ANTHONY: Just looking around at the amount of people who are just absolutely hammered. I'm not a wowser - a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of fun - but, my God, this much? You know, really, this much? One can see how violence can quickly stem from a situation like this, especially when you've got crowds sort of milling around. People are falling over, there's a guy behind me just collapsed on the bench. We saw a girl just around the corner just vomiting like crazy and obviously very heavily intoxicated.

GIRL: (SLURS) Is this, like, a photo opportunity? Look at this, it's got two...

ANTHONY: Monday morning is sort of like the concentration of the bad bits, the highlight of the lows, and that's what we see on every Monday morning.

MAN: So a young fella was assaulted again at a nightclub while drinking...

ANTHONY: We get our cases together on Monday morning and we just rattle through the week until we've finish them. Tell us what happened?

PATIENT: I was at a party one night, on Friday night, and just five blokes came out of nowhere and grabbed me and started laying into me. Got some kicks and punches in. They fractured my eye socket, yeah. It's pretty likely I might be blind if the surgery doesn't go well.

ANTHONY: Oh, don't worry, it's only a slight risk. We've had no-one go blind on us yet.

TIM: Dr Lynham...

ANTHONY: You've essentially got a skull-based fracture, so...

TIM: ..is a maxillo-facial surgeon.

ANTHONY: You're very, very lucky to still be here, quite frankly.

TIM: That means jaw and face and he's been reconstructing them since 1996. His surgery at the Royal Brisbane Hospital is a human smash repair...

ANTHONY: Just going to give your nose a bit of a wriggle. I know it's broken a little bit down here...

TIM: ..each year with more and more victims, most young men, like 19-year-old Jeremy.

ANTHONY: So they still just kept kicking you, even though you were down on the ground and couldn't do anything? They just kept kicking?

JEREMY: They kept kicking. If I hadn't yelled out, I believe they would have kept going until I was dead.

TIM: He went out for Friday night drinks, ended up with a fractured eye socket - an unprovoked attack.

ANTHONY: The past year, we've treated 394 cases. We're seeing between 45 and 65 patients every Monday morning.

TIM: Bloody Monday?

ANTHONY: Yeah, it's a bit like that, bloody Monday. But don't forget, we're one hospital in one city. My colleagues in Sydney - I've got colleagues in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth - they're all doing the same thing. Everyone's doing the same thing. We're trying hard to get through the carnage we saw on Monday morning. I don't know if we're going to be successful this week but we'll give it a shot.

TIM: Australians love a drink but on the drink, we're not pretty. We're ugly, often violent, and, for some, getting smashed also means smashing someone else.

ANTHONY: So just cutting to the bone now. There's the fracture just there.

TIM: How fragile is the human face?

ANTHONY: Extremely. Look at that, that's what an eye socket sits on - look how thin that piece of bone is. And the whole face is made of components like that, just very thin, eggshell pieces of bone.

TIM: Over the years, how much steel have you inserted into flesh and bone?

ANTHONY: Oh, my God. (LAUGHS) I don't know but whoever is making the titanium screws and plates have done alright by me.

TIM: One night in a Rockhampton nightclub three weeks ago changed Josh Parker's life. sober, happy.

JOSH: My girlfriend wanted to dance and so I thought, yeah, I better go and help her out. Went for a dance and a guy come along and grabbed hold of my girlfriend by the hands and I sort of pushed his hands away and, um, got in between her, my girlfriend and him, and, yeah, got a smack in the right-hand side of my face and hit the floor, woke up, and got another hit to the face. And that's all I can remember.

TIM: Josh is 23. Six days after the attack and all he can eat is soup. Surgery is 48 hours away.

JOSH: Basically, my right-hand side of my face is shattered. My cheekbone is broken basically from my temple all the way across to there. Twisted my jaw, my eye socket is broken. I've got to get a plate in underneath my eye so it doesn't sink into my head.

TIM: So, Josh has been punched in the side of the face?

ANTHONY: It's kind of more in this direction. It's come across like this and he's been hit like that, straight in like that. But more likely the heel of a boot or the toe of a boot has gone into there and collapsed that side of his face. So I'd imagine that when we've finished, there will be at least one, two, three, four, five, six plates with 25-30 screws on Josh
just to get him back to normal.

TIM: For life?

ANTHONY: For life, yeah. We're just going to put his top jaw back into position first. So we're just entering into his eye socket here.

TIM: It's both a delicate and brutal operation.

ANTHONY: Just getting to the back of the fracture now so it goes a fair way back. I can think of nothing as precise as when we're operating because it's millimetres. Just absolutely pulverised, bits of bone everywhere.

TIM: It's pretty horrible that any human should have to go through this.

ANTHONY: This poor kid. You know? How could someone do this, honestly?

WOMAN: He's doing really, really well. He just looks horrific. He's doing well.

JOSH: It's affected my life in sport. No more sport for me, really - no more physical sport, anyway. My soccer career, since I was 4, is over.

TIM: What hurts you the most as a mum, to see your son like this?

MUM: If you've got kids yourself,you'd know what. It's not a good feeling to see your son like this, or anybody. I just hope the message gets out there that one punch can do this to anybody. It's terrible. And no mother ever wishes any parent wishes to go through something like this with any of their kids.

NEWSREEL: Ricky Dawson, a 53-year-old father and security guard, was set upon by three drunks with a star picket as he stood watch at a footy club after a break-in Saturday night.

RICKY: I said to them, "I've got two young sons, please don't hurt me anymore," and they just come down with the picket... I don't remember anything else.

TIM: Ricky didn't stand a chance that Friday night in Caloundra. They smashed him so badly, his face was separated from his skull. Dr Lynham is his surgeon. He needed four operations to rebuild Ricky's face. There must be a euphoria when you fix someone's face.

ANTHONY: Oh, yeah. Oh, look, when you get someone who comes back and they just look magnificent and they look fantastic, there's nothing better.

TIM: This is Ricky before. This is Ricky now.

ANTHONY: You're looking pretty good 'cause that two goes for this little incision here to get the plates out 'cause you've got no plates and screws left now.

TIM: He's finally making tentative steps back to normality, like playing footy with his son. But while Anthony can mend faces, he knows the internal scars can last a lifetime.

ANNETTE: The one memory that I have the most difficulty erasing from my mind is...why someone would do that. I was frightened by what I saw. I was upset by what I saw. My son was only three and I think it took him - I think we worked it out - it took him about two weeks before he even would give me a cuddle.

TIM: It's taken two years for Annette Currin to muster the courage to revisit the scene of her attack. It was early Saturday evening in the heart of Brisbane and she'd just left a friend's birthday drinks
to go home to her kids. Then, out of the blue, a cowardly king hit. And where did it happen?

ANNETTE: I don't know because my memory is so splintered because they hit me so hard on the back of the head...my memory's quite splintered, so I don't know exactly where the assault happened but it certainly was somewhere in this area here. They hit me in the back of the head with what the police believed to be a metal pole. I had a broken nose and I required four titanium plates to be put into the right side of my face.

TIM: Who gets a kick out of smashing somebody's face in?

ANTHONY: I have no idea who gets a kick out of this. It's beyond my level of comprehension.

TIM: On this night in Brisbane, the threat of violence was ever present. Aggro was everywhere, not just from men, but women too. It was sad to see. But it's what Dr Lynham never gets to see that's saddest of all.

ANTHONY: One thing that we don't see in our clinic - don't forget, we'd never seen this in our clinic - is death from a punch. They never make it to our clinic. They're dead in intensive care
or they're dead in the emergency department or they're dead in the street.

TIM: Like 15-year-old Matthew Stanley.

PAUL STANLEY: It all came from...one punch.

TIM: Matthew was punched and kicked to death at a friend's birthday party.

PAUL: It was 23 September back in 2006 and it was actually our younger son Nicolas's 12th birthday...

TIM: Paul is his father.

PAUL: ..and we'd decided, as a family, that we were going to go out and have a meal together to celebrate 'cause later on that night, Matty was going to a party that he'd been invited to about two months beforehand. It was one of those nights where everything it so good. He grabbed the back of my hair like that and he just pulled it and he said, "See you later, Dad" and he never did. He never saw us again. This individual punched Matthew on the side of the head and the boys who were with him said that Matt wouldn't have even seen the punch coming. The individual who punched him then proceeded to kick Matthew in the body and in the head. He then knee-dropped onto Matthew's chest, punched Matthew a few more times, got up, kicked Matthew a number of times again...and then he and his mate poured beer over Matthew and called Matthew a coward for not getting up and fighting and walked away laughing. And they went to another party. He was lying there with his eyes closed and I was pleading with him to get up...'cause, see, Matthew had died. I was holding his hand. People look at me and they know there's a reality to this horrible thing called death. My son went to a party to enjoy himself - he didn't go there to die but he did and now I've got to keep telling the message, Matt and I tell the message and say, "Kids, it can happen." When you are dead, you are dead forever - there's no coming back.

TIM: It's a pretty powerful and blunt approach.

PAUL: If I was talking about it in a way that wasn't shocking the kids, well, they wouldn't be listening. I mean, we've spoken to over 150,000 kids in the last 5 years and, I mean, the reaction of the kids today was a fairly typical kind of thing and if we can affect the children like that, then, yes, we are making a difference.

ANTHONY: What I want to yell is two things. Long-term, throw your money into education. That's all we've got left. And short-term, just those three simple steps. Alcohol pricing - you can't buy alcohol from takeaway outlets until you're over 21, and let's consider server liability. You watch the bar staff, how well behaved the bar staff are and how they refuse to serve drunken people when the owner knows that he's going to have to pay for private hospitalisation if someone gets knocked in his nightclub or hotel. I'm out there, yelling and screaming. I just need the politicians to listen. I just need the politicians to listen.

TIM: Tomorrow is Monday and Dr Lynham will be back on the job. He wishes some sensible people would put him out of it, as do the victims.

JEREMY: I don't wish it on anyone else at all. No. It's not fair.

JOSH: Yeah, I don't know what goes through people's heads, to hit someone and then hit them again while they're on the ground and, yeah, it's...it's low and it's dogging, really. Stupid. Shouldn't happen.

END