Living With Facial Disfigurement

Tom Hickey from Cork has suffered from facial disfigurement since he was just two years old, when he accidentally set himself on fire at home. In January last year, he began writing a blog, Hickey’s World, outlining the difficulties of living with disfigurement. “I wanted to reach out to other people who might be in my situation,” he says. Unlike the UK where there are support groups and organisations for people who have facial disfigurement, no such bodies exist here. Tom has looked the figures for people in the UK with facial disfigurement. Using those as his base, he estimates that if there is a similar rate per head of population here, about 40,000 Irish people suffer from some form of facial disfigurement. “From my adolescence onward, I became acutely aware of my face and of now people perceived me. There’s a lot you can dismiss when you’re a kid because you’re still full of the joys of life and discovery. But once you get to adolescence, which is a self-obsessed time in a person’s life anyway, you become acutely aware of your disadvantages. “I began to notice girls, and they of course noticed me, although not in the way I would have wanted. I started to cut myself off and that lasted into my working life. I worked in the Cork Examiner as it was then. I started in the proofreading room and worked my way up to chief sub. I’d go to work and pretend to be happy, but I avoided as many office functions and drinks and parties as I could. “Eventually I got fed up of this self-imposed isolation. I was very lonely, very depressed. I realised this wasn’t what I wanted for the rest of my days.I started to try to meet girls through personal ads. I never mentioned when I responded to the ads that I had the disfigurement so, of course, everybody I met took one look at me and ran away. "I decided instead that I should put an ad in the paper, and the first person I met through that I ended up marrying. Her name is Trish. Trish says that her first reaction when she met me was ‘Whoa', but we started to talk, and we clicked, and we had a romance that led to a long and happy marriage.We have two children who are 29 and 26 now. Growing up, they didn’t notice there was anything different about me, I was just their Daddy. "There was one incident in Dublin Zoo one day when a bung of teenage girls basically started following us around staring at me and pointing at me and talking about me. The kids were very upset. It was the first time I realised that this was something that could hurt my family and I felt responsible". .