Roisin Craft Interview, copyright Victoria Clarke 2001-09-17 1176 words.

Walking down the street beside Roisin Craft, everyone is staring. Roisin is nearly six feet tall, with long dark hair, flashing, flirtatious eyes, and geometrical cheekbones, inherited from her Cherokee Indian father.  Men and women stop in their tracks to check her out, but Roisin takes it in her stride.  What her admirers don’t realise is that this face, this exquisite example of the human potential for aesthetic perfection, will soon be sliced open, for the third time and peeled off, like a banana skin.  Roisin explains that she first discovered a lump in her head in 1996, when she was sixteen. 
“At  first, it was a tiny bump over my left eye.  Over five months it grew, so that it was actually pushing in my eye and starting to deform me. So I had to go to hospital and it had to be removed.”
Was she afraid that it could be life-threatening?
“Yes, but I believe in God and I believe that everything happens for a reason”she says, calmly. What Roisin had was not a malignant growth, fortunately, but something called an osteoma, which both Merriam-Webster’s  and Brittanica  define as being a benign tumour, composed of bone tissue.    According to Andrew Huvos, author of “Bone Tumors, Diagnosis, Treatment and Prognosis”(W.B.Saunders, 1991), osteomas are normally completely asymptomatic and only present problems if their location is interfering with breathing, hearing or sight. They are three times as likely to be found in women as in men, and multiple osteomas are commonly associated with Gardner’s Syndrome.  The condition is rare and so far, no-one seems to know what causes it, although some studies have suggested links with the use of fluoride.  
            The operation to remove the growth was not pleasant.  ‘They cut me open from the middle of my crown, and peeled the skin down to my nose, so it was literally just flapping there,” says Roisin. “It was like the movie ‘Face Off”. I had fifty-six staples in my head.  And I couldn’t open my eyes.  I was like Bride of Frankenstein!”
Roisin took a year to recover from the operation and when she was better, moved to Hong Kong, on a modelling contract, for three months. There, she was inspired to design a range of clothing, using Chinese silks, which she called the ‘Jade Butterfly” collection.  “I modelled the clothes myself and put together a catalogue and in 1999, I came back to Dublin, to take “Jade Butterfly” to Ireland.  Three months after the launch, I discovered the bump again.  New Years Eve, 1999.  I was all dressed up to go out.  For the first time since the operation, I had actually put make-up on my face, and I noticed the small bump.  I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do, I was so afraid that it had come back again.  I couldn’t even call the doctor, because it was a public holiday, I was absolutely in bits.” 
Roisin duly had another  CT scan and was told that she would need to have another operation.  “I  had the operation and they released me after two and a half days, which I thought was a bit soon,” she says, “But they explained that  I would be better off at home, because I needed TLC to get through it.” 
So off she went, to recuperate  for the second time.  Hospital was clearly not somewhere Roisin wanted to be.  “I remember coming out of the surgery for the second time and refusing to use the bed-pan.’ She looks at me defiantly.  ‘There was no way I was going to use the bedpan.  Even if I was eighty, I would still feel the same way.  It took five of them to help me, but I did it.  I was just out of surgery, I didn’t know where I was, who I was or what I was doing, but I knew that I was not going to go in that bedpan! Even in your most vulnerable moments.  Even in your most vulnerable moments, you have to appear to be together.”
I suggest, gently, that appearing together would be the last thing on my mind, I’d just want the painkillers.  Roisin laughs and says that we all have different priorities. Watching  her, as we eat and seeing the reaction of others in the restaurant to her astonishing good looks, I have to ask her if the operations have affected her modelling career.
“Well  obviously,” she says.  “It’s an extreme trauma and you have to overcome that trauma, mentally, physically and emotionally.  It took at least a year to recuperate, each time. So of course it’s affected my career.  But you heal, you move on and you get on with your life.  We all have our own pain, Victoria.”  She holds my gaze, determinedly, for a moment.  I agree with her and ask her if she’s tried alternative medicine.
‘I’ve tried acupuncture.  But this is a very unusual case, even for Chinese doctors. I’ve done some Reiki, yoga, Tai Chi.  I’ve been a vegetarian all my life.  I’ve never eaten junk food or meat, always organic food, from the time I was born.  So I know it’s not something that I’m eating, or putting in my body, because I’ve explored all the options and eliminated everything.  I don’t do anything that’s bad for me.  I’m going to have to do research myself, to find out what to do about it.’
She does tell me that one healer suggested that the growths might have something to do with the fact that Roisin’s father abandoned her at an early age.  So a few years ago, she and her mother and sister set out to track him down. They did find him, ironically, in Dublin, San Francisco, but finding him has not solved the problem, because the growths have re-appeared.  Roisin is in no hurry to have another operation, if she can help it, but  knows that it will be inevitable.
“This is my personal pain, but at this moment in my life, I don’t want it.  So I’m going to avoid doing anything about it until I have to do something about it. I’m not freaking out about it.  I’ve learned to deal with the problem. I just want to know how long I have before I have to have the operation again, because obviously it will grow and it will start to deform my face.  And I don’t want that.  We’re all vain, we all want to look our best, and big lumps coming out of the side of your head isn’t exactly going to earn you brownie points with the fellas, is it?”  She laughs, mischievously, but it is obvious that behind the laughter and the confident, glamorous exterior, Roisin is quite worried.  As we say goodbye and I leave Roisin to chat about raw food diets and vegetarianism, with a new friend, I am inspired by her total absence of self pity, in the face of what must surely be an enormously frustrating situation.