Mark Tatum was just over 40 years old when a fungus began eating away at his face.
They called it the ‘black fungus,’ or mucormycosis in medical terms, and it enters the body through something as simple as touching soil or rotten food. In Tatum’s case, it progressed quickly: his nose, eyes, cheekbones, upper jaw, and teeth were destroyed. Dr. Wayne K. Stadelmann, a plastic surgeon at the University of Louisville, later admitted that at first ‘they didn’t think he was going to survive.’
To stop the fungus from reaching his brain, doctors had to remove nearly all the structures in his face. They used skin and bone from his own leg to reconstruct his palate so he could speak and eat again. Then came the most extreme step: a titanium structure embedded in his face to support a complete facial prosthesis, the most complex one prosthetist Zafrulla Khan had ever made in his career.
Two years after it all began, Tatum looked at his new face and said: ‘I won’t be handsome, but I’m almost there.’ He died in 2005, but his doctor remembers him as ‘a true testament to the human spirit.’
