Woman’s Scars More Than Just Skin-Deep

FULLERTON — In her solitude, Carol Guscott wonders why.

Three years after two thugs poured battery acid on her face in an act of revenge, leaving her blind and scarred, she wonders why fate has been so cruel to her.

She wonders how she will make it through the pain and loneliness, now that she is permanently deformed.

After coming from Jamaica nearly two years ago to Orange County, where local churches, charity groups and residents have helped her pay for half a dozen reconstructive eye and face surgeries, she is still anguished by her looks and still haunted by the memory of that terrifying day her life was turned upside-down.

Though she has regained some of her sight, her face is heavily scarred and her eyes are veiled by a layer of thick white film, covering the remnants of her once-luminous brown eyes.

Guscott fears looking in the mirror. Just feeling the thick, leathery scars on her face is hard enough. She no longer has a nose, just two holes to breathe through. Her lips were melted away, leaving only a patch of skin. She is so uncomfortable with her looks that when she ventures out, she wears a ski mask, hat and enormous black glasses.

“ ‘Why me?’ I keep asking,” Guscott said quietly. “I have prayed, I have been sincere, and I have done everything I should, but I feel trapped.”

She is still hoping to undergo more reconstructive surgery, but the operations will cost more than $60,000--money her sponsors at the local Lions Club are having a hard time raising.

But her toughest moments come when she thinks of her 12-year-old son, whom she has not seen since she came to California.

Dale, said Guscott, is having a hard time in school and tells her every month when they talk on the phone that he misses her. Guscott’s elderly mother is taking care of the boy, but she is unable to help him with his homework and discipline him like his mother could, Guscott said.

Lions Club sponsor Robert Crancer said he is hoping that an airline will donate a ticket for Dale to visit his mother this summer.

“That is what keeps me going--the thought of that little boy,” Guscott said this week, sitting in her sunny apartment in Fullerton.

Guscott’s ordeal began as she closed her hardware shop in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in July 1994. Two men who had tried to sell her shoddy lumber a few days earlier returned, as they had promised, vowing to get even, she said.

Guscott said they stuck a knife to her throat, tied her to a chair, poured battery acid on her head and watched it trickle down her face, chest, inner thighs and left arm.

They left her writhing in pain as the acid permanently disfigured her.

Her friends abandoned her, saying they could not stand to look at her face. Her landlord evicted her, and her family shunned her.

But then Paulette Allen, a Connecticut woman who was visiting Jamaica, heard Guscott’s story and came to her aid.

Through her connections in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Allen contacted plastic surgeon Harrell Robinson, who is based in Orange and is a member of a church in Riverside. He agreed to perform the first operations on Guscott for free.

In February of this year, the Fullerton Lions Club stepped in, since the charity’s chief purpose is to help people in need regain their eyesight. The club paid for Guscott’s eyelid replacement and corneal transplant operations.

Crancer estimated that those operations cost $60,000.

Though her vision is still blurred, Guscott can see movement and shadows. She underwent another surgery Tuesday to prevent her right eye from watering all the time.

“There is nothing like helping someone regain their vision,” said Crancer, a travel agent.

Though her situation is improving, Guscott still faces at least three or four more surgeries for her lips, nose, face, neck and chest that her new surgeon says will cost more than $60,000.

She estimates that it will take another two years before she can go home.

Guscott rarely leaves her apartment except for doctor’s appointments and to go to church.

Most of the time, she sits at home, doing leg stretches, watching television or lying on her bed, pondering her life.

She tries not to be bitter.

Sometimes she cries. Other times she is angry when she thinks of her assailants. One of them is on the loose. The other one was shot and killed during a robbery, a death that spared him the pain she has suffered, Guscott noted.

As she reflected on her years in Orange County, she said her inner turmoil has kept her from finding peace.

“I’ve met some really good people here, and I’m so grateful,” she said. “[But] after three years, I am still in pain, I am still suffering and the isolation has been [difficult]. I am fearful of looking at myself. If I looked a little better, then it would be a relief.”