[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 105 (Monday, July 29, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1424-E1425]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         HONORING TAKIRA GASTON

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JOHN B. LARSON

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, July 26, 2002

  Mr. LARSON of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor and pay 
tribute to Takira Gaston of Hartford, Connecticut. On July 4, 2001, 
Takira was playing at her family's Fourth of July cookout like any 7 
years old would be on hot summer afternoon. However, this typical 
American scene was shattered in an instant by the sound of gunshots. 
Two drug dealers were exchanging gunfire when one of the bullets struck 
Takira in the face.
  Takira survived and has faced numerous surgeries, with more to come. 
She has handled the pain and fear with courage that is rare in such a 
young person. Her brave fight was chronicled by Tina Brown of the 
Hartford Courant on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. This 
moving story describe Takira's perseverance and I wish to submit it for 
the Record.
  No child should have to go through the ordeal that Takira has gone 
through. I ask my colleagues to join with me in honoring Takira's 
courage and continuing to work to rid our cities of the violence that 
plagues them.

               [From the Hartford Courant, July 4, 2002]

                          The Courage to Heal

                           (By Tina A. Brown)

       New Haven.--After riding the toy cars and playing ``Donkey 
     Kong'' on the computer, Takira Gaston flashes a bright smile 
     that makes others in the pediatric surgery center forget the 
     protruding scars on her face.
       She's having a good day on this sunny Thursday despite 
     being at Yale-New Haven Hospital for her second round of 
     reconstructive surgery. She's thinking about splashing in her 
     family's above-ground pool and jumping on the trampoline in 
     her backyard, a safe place in a new neighborhood where 
     gunfire is seldom heard.
       After playing, Takira takes time to think of someone else. 
     Someone like her, who was shot in the face.
       Takira tells her adoptive mother, Delphine Gaston-Walters, 
     that she wants to visit New Haven police Officer Robert 
     Fumiatti, who's recovering at Yale-New Haven after being shot 
     last month by a suspected drug dealer. They talk briefly with 
     Fumiatti, whose head is stabilized by a metal halo. He calls 
     Takira ``courageous'' and reaches out to shake her hand. But 
     her good mood vanishes. She's scared. She refuses to shake 
     his hand and backs out of his hospital room.
       ``They are not going to touch my face,'' she says, with 
     anger in her eyes, as she returns to the surgery center. Deep 
     down, she knowns she has no choice, but that doesn't stop her 
     from launching into an hour-long temper tantrum.

[[Page E1425]]

       Such are the shifting emotions of an 8-year-old girl trying 
     to recover from a stray bullet that tore through her face--
     and awoke people to the violence in the city--on July 4, 
     2001. The men responsible for her shooting, Anthony Carter 
     and Maurice Miller, were convicted this spring. But for 
     Takira, the physical and emotional scars continue to heal, in 
     fits and starts.


                            taking a gamble

       Unlike a light-skinned person with a bullet wound, Takira 
     faces another obstacle to her healing simply because she 
     happens to be dark-skinned.
       She is prone to keloids, an excessive growth of scar tissue 
     common among African Americans. The skin disorder has left 
     thick, shiny scar tissue in the areas where the bullet cut 
     through her cheek and where surgeons cut under her chin to 
     piece her face back together.
       She has returned to surgery to have the keloids removed, a 
     gamble that her doctors and Gaston-Walters believe is worth 
     taking. If the surgery is successful, Dr. James C. Alex, 
     director of the division of facial plastic and reconstructive 
     surgery at the Yale School of Medicine, is hopeful that the 
     remaining scars left on Takira's face will gradually blend in 
     with her otherwise perfect skin tone. But there's a 50 to 80 
     percent chance the keloids will return, just as bad or worse.
       Takira has drifted into drug-induced sleep just before 3 
     p.m., as she is rolled through the double doors, draped in a 
     cornflower blue paper sheet.
       The sheet covers her up to the lower half of her chin, 
     which is facing up toward the satellite dish-shaped lights. 
     As the clock on the wall marks 3:11 p.m., Alex sits on 
     Takira's left side and Dr. Bruce Schneider sits at her right.
       Alex begins the delicate process of cutting out the scars 
     and sewing Takira's face back together, much like a master 
     quilter. Nurse John Breslin hands him a scalpel to cut around 
     the U-shaped scar under Takira's chin. Schneider swabs the 
     blood where Alex has cut, and applies medicine to limit the 
     bleeding.
       The scar, thick and wide, is in the same spot that Alex and 
     Schneider cut open last July, when they pulled up the skin 
     over her lip line, to expose her shattered jawbone, broken 
     teeth and bullet fragments. The area was cleaned and rebuilt 
     and a metal plate has been serving as her temporary jawbone 
     while the bone grows back.
       With methodical movements, Schneider, an oral surgeon and 
     formerly chief resident at the Hospital of St. Raphael in New 
     Haven, uses a small metal tool with two prongs to grasp the 
     outer skin tissue. Alex examines the inner tissue and tests 
     the area for nerve activity. Together, for another 25 
     minutes, they work on both sides of Takira's face, slowly 
     cutting around the inner tissue of the worst scar.
       Alex begins sewing together the inner skin using blue 
     sutures, which look like dental floss, though fine as hair. 
     The goal is to sew the tissue together without gripping it 
     too hard, Alex instructs. ``We are trying not to create 
     tension on the skin. This will give you a more favorable 
     scar. You will always have a scar.''
       Another 30 minutes pass. Alex and Schneider pull up the 
     outer skin, and prepare for another ``close.'' Again, they 
     start sewing from opposite sides. A local pain reliever is 
     applied to the scar tissue now sewn together and shaped like 
     a thin cornrow-like braid. Rather than sew in a straight 
     line, they create a ridge-like skin overlay, so that if 
     Takira's new scar expands, it will push down flat rather than 
     bubble up into a keloid, Alex says.
       At 5:11 p.m., two hours after they opened it, the first 
     scar under Takira's chin is nearly done. Their work is 
     covered with antibiotics and an oily liquid that makes the 
     bandages stick like glue.
       Once the chin is finished, they move on to smaller scars on 
     her neck, where incisions were cut to make way for a 
     breathing tube in her throat. Next, they cut out the scars on 
     her cheek, and repeat the process of sewing up the inner 
     tissue and the outer skin, covering them with antibiotics and 
     lotion.
       Surgery is over at 6:58 p.m., three hours and 47 minutes 
     after it began.


                           nightmares return

       Takira, her mother and the surgeons won't know for several 
     months whether the keloids will return.
       But it was a risk they took because Takira didn't want the 
     scars to continue giving ammunition to the meanspirited 
     children who call her scarface. Gaston-Walters, a dutiful 
     parent, wants to protect Takira from those kinds of mental 
     scars.
       But for Takira, the pain and fear associated with the 
     surgery make it hard to envision the outcome.
       ``Come on Missy, be nice,'' Gaston-Walters tells Takira 
     four days after the surgery, ``It's time for the stitches to 
     come out.''
       Takira is trying to hit Dr. Alex, who wants to remove the 
     stitches from her chin, cheek and neck at a record pace to 
     prevent new scars from forming. But first he has to endure 
     the fight of the tough-spirited little girl. Gaston-Walters 
     grasps Takira's hands to restrain her, and Takira is promised 
     a trip to Chuck E. Cheese's if she behaves. But she continues 
     to cry, scream and fight.
       She is given a sedative, and she goes to sleep. She appears 
     at peace, but at home since the surgery, she wakes up at 
     night frightened by her dreams. The nighmares had stopped 
     about eight months after the shooting and the family's move 
     to a quieter neighborhood, but the surgery has brought it all 
     back again.
       Takira is lying on her side when she wakes up in the 
     examining room. Alex has finished taking out the stitches on 
     her cheek and chin and is working on her neck when she 
     flinches. She returns to a fighting posture, but avoids a 
     full-blown tantrum when Alex reassures her that the procedure 
     is nearly over.
       He applies the oily liquid that smells like evergreen to 
     each scar before placing white strips of tape, which act like 
     sutures, on her face.
       Removing keloids through surgery is risky, according to 
     experts who have used a number of techniques to remove the 
     scar tissue, including surgery, radiation and herbal creams.
       ``The keloids are like cancer that gets bigger and 
     bigger,'' said Dr. Tom Geraghty, a plastic surgeon from 
     Kansas City who has spent the past 24 years removing keloids 
     from patients in Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.
       Some patients develop the scarring from a bug bite, others 
     from burns and other injuries that are untreated. Geraghty 
     has seen a boy with a burn on his chest develop a keloid 
     ``thick as armor'' and plenty of girls with keloids ``the 
     size of a grapefruit'' as a result of ear-piercing.
       No one can say yet why people with darker complexions are 
     more likely than lighter-skinned people to get keloids. When 
     children like Takira are afflicted with keloids, Geraghty 
     supports the decision to remove the scars through surgery.
       ``Poor baby. Surgery is always a gamble, but a good gamble 
     if you have no choice,'' he said. ``If it were my daughter, 
     I'd do it.''


                            Splashing Around

       Almost two weeks after the surgery, Takira got her wish to 
     play in the water. The portable pool hasn't been blown up 
     yet, but she, her brother John and twin sister, Takara, take 
     turns playing with the garden hose in a make-believe game of 
     carwash.
       There is no talk of the white bandages that still cover the 
     lower half of Takira's face. The scar on her cheek is no 
     longer covered and seems to be healing normally, no sign of a 
     new keloid.
       ``Dr. Schneider said it was OK for her to get wet,'' 
     Gaston-Walters said.
       After the bandages are off, Gaston-Walters will apply an 
     expensive over-the-counter herbal ointment to each of 
     Takira's wounds, hoping to prevent excessive scarring.
       None of that is on Takira's mind as she waits for her turn 
     to rinse off the gold-colored pickup parked in the driveway. 
     The game on this hot summer day, just three days before the 
     anniversary of the shooting, is more about getting wet than 
     washing cars.
       ``You wet me,'' Takira yells to Takara, who hands her the 
     hose.
       You wet me too,'' Takara says.
       They yell this loud enough for Gaston-Walters to hear. She 
     laughs aloud as Takira and the others stand, dripping wet, 
     outside the front door of the small Cape-style house. ``They 
     do this all of the time. They've changed clothes three times 
     today already.''
       More surgery looms next year to remove the metal plate from 
     Takira's jaw. For now, things are back to normal for Takira 
     and her family.

     

                          ____________________