Changing face: The transformation of Roger Jamieson

As the saying goes, there's a time for everything.

You can make what you want of Roger Jamieson's decision to talk about his disfiguring birthmark after having declined to do so in the past.

A provincial election is brewing. Jamieson, 57, is running for the Liberal nomination in the district of Bellevue. He doesn't put it in so many words himself, but it's obvious he has a point to make that he both is and isn't the same man, birthmark and all.

We're sitting in the living room of his family home in Swift Current. The presence of his deceased parents is all around us in the room's country-club spaciousness, the old-fashioned elegance of the furniture, the many objects hanging on the walls, from yesterday's photographs and paintings to the long-barrelled guns of more distant days.

The whisper of former power and influence, of political discussion and intrigue, haunts every nook and cranny here.

I've come to ask Jamieson the question that must have crossed the mind of everybody who ever laid eyes on the huge birthmark that covers more than half of his face: How do you live with something like that?

An unexpected answer

I start by asking him to tell me about his own moment of recognizing how different he looked. His answer was not what I expected.

"I was six or seven years old," he recalls, "and someone made a comment to my mother in the grocery store in Churchill Square, 'I'm so sorry for you.' My mother turned around and gave her the gears."

I was six or seven years old, and someone made a comment to my mother in the grocery store in Churchill Square, "I'm so sorry for you."My mother turned around and gave her the gears.- Roger Jamieson

Jamieson says he never felt he was treated differently because of his birthmark, at least not at home. He grew up in a very public family, never felt shoved into the background or in a place he shouldn't be. In the early years his father Don Jamieson co-owned the province's first television station.

Later, Don Jamieson became one of the province's senior politicians. The whole province got to see the family each year, including Roger, on the television special Christmas with the Jamiesons.

He implies it wasn't just his mother who had his back. Just about everybody else did in a small province where belonging and being accepted still amounted to much the same.

Yes, he got teased by other kids. Yes, he felt sorry for himself. And yes, he got into fights, and being tall and strong, he gave as good as he got.

'He really did a job on me'

Then, at the age of 12, came the fight that set him straight.

"He was bigger than me. He really did a job on me, and I came home, and, after my mother cleaned me up, my father sat me down and said, look, you can let this define your life or you can rise above it."

Jamieson Senior went on to talk about his own battle with being overweight, about learning to be comfortable in your own skin even if you think some others think it makes you look ugly.

"And I took that to heart. And from then on in I determined I wasn't going to let it limit what I was going to do. It's not my problem, it's the world's problem, if they can't accept people who look a little bit different."

As he puts it, you play the hand you're dealt.

Apart from the birthmark, it wasn't a bad hand. Jamieson went on to work for the family-owned radio station. After the station was sold, he turned the family property in Swift Current into Kilmory,a successful resort. He became a leader in the provincial, then national tourism industry. He toured widely and did a lot of public speaking.

As if to punish him for all this, his birthmark got worse.

Difficulties with speaking and eating

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has a similar, though much smaller, birthmark on his forehead. It's known as a port-wine stain. The blood capillaries of the skin don't develop properly. Over the years the stain grows darker. The affected tissue may swell and become grotesquely deformed.

In Jamieson's case his lips became so enlarged and so malformed, looks became the least of his worries. He was experiencing growing difficulties speaking, even eating.

He and his physician, St. John's plastic surgeon David Jewer, spent close to six years discussing the options and trying to find a specialist with first-hand experience in the difficult operation Jamieson needed the surgical reduction of his lips.

When they realized they were running out of time, Dr. Jewer successfully performed the surgery himself.

That was eight years ago.

Jamieson says the surgery changed his life. If so, it was not the life he had been leading that was changed but the life coming at him and threatening to undo everything.

Nothing else has changed. Not his mother's affirmation when she defended him. Not the can-do attitude his father instilled in him.

Nor the likelihood that as he campaigns and goes knocking on doors he will run into the same old stares with the same mixed bag of reactions the recognition, the understanding, the pity, the embarrassment, the confusion.

There's a bright side to that, Jamieson says, joking. Not everybody will vote for him, but everybody will remember him.