After the car exploded, James managed to release his seatbelt and get out from the back of the Land Rover. His clothes were on fire, face extremely swollen and he was losing a lot of blood. Around 40 percent of his body was burnt, and at least 19 percent were third-degree burns.
Luckily, the driver in the car behind was a woman who’d been trained as a nurse and knew exactly how to handle the situation. She quickly drove James to St. Lawrence Hospital in Chepstow where he was taken to an operating theatre for emergency treatment.
After 10 days, he was transferred to Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton that had a medical team which specialised in facial burns and was trained by Harold Gillies, father of plastic surgery during the second world war. He spent five years under their care.
He had undergone skin graft surgeries which took approximately three months to get a complete cover of grafted skin on the wounds. As the right side of his body was badly burnt, the areas available as donor for skin grafts were essentially his left leg, back and buttocks.
However, a few months later, the scars were setting in around the skin grafts which caused the skin to contract and become much smaller. This had caused problems, particularly for James’ chin as the skin was pulling his face down tightly.
Background picture credit: James Partridge
*Wolfe graft: A type of full-thickness skin graft
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In 1990, James published his first book titled “Changing Faces: The challenge of facial disfigurement” that was written and designed to give people practical advice on how to rebuild or build one’s self-esteem.
“I had conditioned myself to think that good looks are passports to success and I had to debunk all of that. I had to debunk the myth that people with scars might be villains and nasty people. I also had to debunk the myth that surgery was going to fix it. No matter how many operations I had or have today, it’s not going to remove my scar,” James explained.
In 1992, James set up Changing Faces with the help of psychologist Nichola Rumsey. The charity supports individuals and families who are living with facial disfigurements such as scars, cleft lip, and even people who had received poor cosmetic surgery results.
Changing Faces
Changing Faces was founded with a focus to achieve three main aims:
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To help people who are born with or acquired any sort of disfigurement lead the life they want, full of confidence and self-esteem.
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To transform health care so that it does not focus solely on finding surgical answers and medical solutions while neglecting patients’ psychological issues.
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To transform public’s attitude so that they do not stigmatise people with disfigurements.
The charity has launched a series of campaigns to raise awareness of prejudice against disfigurements, including running poster campaigns of people with disfigurements on the London Underground billboards and railway stations, the appearance of James as a newsreader on Channel 5 for a week and challenging public examples of ridiculing people with disfigurements.
On 26 May 2017, Changing Faces held the UK’s first Face Equality Day to celebrate people’s lives and their prospects as well as to raise consciousness among schools, policymakers, media and businesses that creating fairness for disfigured people meant treating them fairly and without prejudice.
“We have a long way to go, but we’re starting to get, certainly in the UK and I believe in other countries too, awareness on how important it is that people with facial disfigurements are included and valued for what they can bring to society, their talents and skills, and not judged by their appearance,” said James.