The Face Of Courage

Susan is showing the world how cancer ravaged her face to send a message: don’t let it happen to you.

- Carla Coetzee

HER face isn’t easy to look at. It’s badly disfigured and there’s an enormous bulge where her nose and upper lip used to be.

But this brave woman is turning her face to the world for a reason: she wants her story to be a cautionary tale, a warning to others never to ignore an abnormal mole or a sore that won’t heal.

“I burst into tears when I saw myself,” Susan Oosthuizen says of the moment she caught sight of her face in a mirror after the first operation to remove half her nose.

Skin cancer then claimed the other half, along with her upper lip and part of her cheeks.

Susan (64) says she’s never thought of herself as pretty, just acceptable.

But now everything has changed. “I feel gross and unfeminine. I don’t feel like me when I look in a mirror.”

Yet she has something many other women – even beautiful, rich and famous women – might envy: a husband who loves her and supports her no matter what.

When she starts talking about her trauma her voice cracks and she looks over at her rock of the past 46 years.

Neels (67) smiles, rises from his chair and comes over to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“She’s my wife,” he says. “I’ve told her it doesn’t matter what she looks like. I love her and when I take her hand I know it’s still her.”

SUSAN’S nightmare started about three years ago when she discovered a small sore on the left side of her nose.

She thought it was a stubborn blackhead and for a year she treated it herself and wished it away – but it gradually grew bigger.

When she eventually consulted a doctor she was told she had skin cancer.