Plastic Surgery

Mohammad Fraid has spent the last four years living with burn scars on his face and hands. The 16-year-old was only 12 when a bomb exploded on the bus he was riding in Kabul, Afghanistan. After fleeing the capital with his family, Fraid resigned himself to living with the personal scars of his country's civil war. Today, the war continues, but Fraid is a long way from the Peshawar, Pakistan, refugee camp that had become home. He is in Delaware County, and his disfigurement already has started to disappear - thanks to the free plastic surgery begun yesterday at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland.

At first glance, I'd say David J. Arend doesn't need much aesthetic help. His eyes are a piercing blue and his chiseled looks resemble Bruce Willis in his Moonlighting days. His shoulders are broad. He has nice legs. But Arend, 47, of Cherry Hill doesn't think so. The married father of three is unhappy with his calves. Over the years, he's lost more than 100 pounds and now, with diet and exercise, he's trying to redefine his physique. It's just that in his mind, his legs are not proportionate.

Jennifer Pilla, of Cinnaminson, N.J., says her stomach has not been so flat since before she was married. Feeling sexier at 41, she is constantly showing off her stomach, making her friends jealous. Still, her friends do know that the 10 pounds she lost one day last month were removed - through abdominoplasty - by Dr. Emely Karandy of Gladwyne. A Philadelphia woman who insisted on not being named admits to her friends that she had a nose job, but she adds that she would never, ever tell her friends about the breast augmentation she had performed by Karandy on the same day in May. She has revealed the secret about her breast implants to only one girlfriend.

Sure, she was just a teen-ager, and you know how impulsive teens can be. But Nancy Ford, who had cosmetic surgery done on her nose and chin, is still happy six years later with the procedures she underwent while a Lower Merion High School senior. "I would do it again in a moment," said the 24-year-old actress. "After looking in the mirror every morning, I wasn't happy with my nose as a facial feature. I didn't have a jaw line. I knew that cosmetic surgery was the answer. People who tried to be nice said, 'Your nose gives you character.

Bob Corse is 57, but inside he feels 25. Outside he's doing all he can to look it. He's had his nose fixed. He's had the skin on his neck tightened. He's had his upper and lower eyelids trimmed. He's had his cheeks plumped. He's had his chin extended and his lips fattened. This summer, he had the center of his world enhanced when he had his penis thickened. "It's a male thing," said Corse, who wears his gray hair spiked and an earring in his left ear. Penile enhancement is just the latest controversy in the trend of men seeking to surgically alter their appearance.

A double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery will be shown live over the Internet tomorrow morning from an operating room at the St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne. At 11 a.m., two surgeons will operate on a 47-year-old mother and registered nurse who has been diagnosed with early-stage, non-invasive breast cancer and opted to undergo a mastectomy. The patient, Patti Derman, of Holland, Pa., agreed to have her surgery broadcast over the Internet because of the educational awareness that will result, she said.

In anticipation of large numbers of battle casualties during World War II, the U.S. Army's Medical Department began a hospital construction program throughout the country in the early part of the war. Under this program, the Valley Forge General Hospital was built in Charlestown Township near Phoenixville. It opened on March 12, 1943. And from that date until 1950, it treated more than 60,000 GIs. "The facilities were excellent, my treatment was outstanding, and the food was good.

Next to a photograph of himself, Bill Dwyer of Philadelphia wrote a note to a young Shanghai woman, Pan Ping, last June. "Trust me," he wrote. "I will try to help you. " He did. Two weeks ago, after a harrowing ordeal stretching over 2 1/2 years, Ping, 25, was flown to the United States for reconstructive facial surgery. Twelve days ago, a Buffalo doctor rebuilt her nose. Tomorrow, at Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, chief of plastic surgery Dennis Monteiro will try to save the rest of her face.

This nation gave the world the silicone darlings of Baywatch, Barbara Hershey's collagen pout, and the peculiar metamorphosis of man-in-the-mirror Michael Jackson. Each December, ageless Dick Clark hosts the TV celebration of another year's passing. So it may come as a bit of a surprise that America the Beautiful isn't the reigning queen of everything skin-deep. When it comes to vanity, Brazil takes the crown. Yes, the land of soccer and sambas and endless Atlantic Coast is also the mecca of plastic surgery, with close to 200,000 people going under the knife last year, and an estimated quarter-million expected to alter their looks in 1998.

A 4-year-old boy was attacked and severely bitten in the face by a pit bull dog on Monday and will require plastic surgery to his lips and his right eye to mend the wounds and scars, police and the boy's mother said yesterday. "He's getting better and over it," said a distraught Mary Petraline about her son, Anthony, who was sleeping soundly yesterday at home in the 1200 block of Lafayette Street. Anthony Petraline was visiting a next-door neighbor's house with his sister, Crystal, about 5 p.m. Monday, police said.

"Let me tell you the best part about getting older," 66-year-old screen legend Diane Keaton says. There's a good part? "The best part is that I'm still here and, because the end is in sight, I treasure it all more," Keaton tells AARP The Magazine. "You have to live life that way, you know? Take risks. Do things you can't imagine. 'Cause hey, why not, right?" Keaton has not (yet) resorted to plastic surgery to offset age. "I haven't had it," she says. "But never say never.

Vagina envy is real. So, instead of leaving well enough alone, some women are opting to get a so-called designer vagina and undergoing labiaplasties to contour floppy, protruding inner lips. Some also are seeking liposuction to slim fatty pubic mounds. Although some patients request medical intervention because the way their bodies are configured makes them feel uncomfortable riding bicycles or doing other physical activities, the single biggest reason women request genital cosmetic surgery is aesthetics.

'A psychiatrist with a scalpel" is the way Mark Solomon describes himself. Solomon, who has been performing cosmetic and other plastic surgery for 26 years, said judging patients' expectations is just as important as operating skill. "If I can't deliver, my answer is, 'I'm not doing it,' " said Solomon, whose practice is based in Bala Cynwyd. He estimated that he rejects up to 30 percent of prospective patients, most because their expectations are unrealistic. Jesse A. Taylor, a plastic surgeon with Penn Medicine, said he turns down an even higher estimated number, up to 40 percent.

Which cosmetic surgeries do women want most after childbirth? Which cosmetic procedure is the most popular with men between 30 and 60? How have face-lifts changed over the last 40 years? When Daniel C. Baker, one of the country's most renowned plastic surgeons, graduated from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1968, he never could have dreamed that 43 years later he would be cochairing, with plastic surgeons Sherrell J. Aston and Thomas D. Rees, a symposium that included sessions on vaginal rejuvenation and reshaping the buttocks Italian, Brazilian, French, or Swedish style.

ATLANTIC CITY - The latest casino promotion in Atlantic City gives new meaning to "going bust. " The Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort plans to give $25,000 worth of plastic surgery to the winner of a player's card contest. The lucky one can mix and match surgeries including breast enhancements, tummy tucks, liposuction and face-lifts, until the total hits $25,000. "We wanted to change the face of a typical casino promotion," said Kathleen McSweeney, senior vice president of marketing for Trump Entertainment Resorts.

John Harlan Moore Jr., 58, of Radnor, a plastic surgeon and educator at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, died of lung cancer on Monday, Sept. 26. Early in his career at Jefferson, Dr. Moore traveled with Operation Smile to developing countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, Nicaragua, as well as to Africa to treat cleft lip and palate deformities. After a trip to Liberia in 1988, he told the Philadelphia Daily News, "There's tremendous satisfaction knowing you made an impact on one family by a simple operation.

Question: I have a 2-year-old daughter (almost 3). My mother lives several states away, but we Skype regularly; she rarely visits. She has always been very focused on looks - I grew up feeling unattractive - and now she has turned her attention to my daughter, saying things during our Skyping discussions like, "She's too fat. She needs to exercise every day. And she needs plastic surgery on her nose. " My daughter is an adorable and perfectly normal girl. I'm afraid she might start understanding these things soon.

Four months in the big house under the gaze of overworked guards and violent inmates? Pshaw! Lindsay Lohan , 24, won't have to deal with any of that. The Mean Girls star on Wednesday brokered a deal - through her lawyer - pleading guilty to stealing a $2,500 necklace. Judge Stephanie Sautner gifted LiLo with 120 days in jail and 60 days of community service. Last month, LiLo got another 120-day jail sentence for parole violation from her pesky '07 DUI conviction.

Everything is going just fine for a guy named Lette, a married man with a string of patents for electronic inventions, until one day people all agree that he's remarkably ugly, in case he hasn't noticed. He hasn't - and that's the first thing that makes you wonder about German playwright Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One , which the Walnut Street Theatre is presenting on its small third-floor stage with a gusto that lifts the piece a few notches. Lette (richly played by Ben Dibble, whose sincere character interpretation heightens the cartoonishness around him)

She's already survived a spiritual marathon as foil to Howard Stern 's various grotesqueries. Now Robin Quivers can boast that she's survived a real marathon. Quivers, 58, on Sunday finished the 26.2-mile New York City Marathon - having lost 80 pounds and switched to a vegan diet. "My life totally changed, and now I have this amazing amount of energy," Robin tells People. "Changing my body has given me the ability to do all these amazing things that I never in a million years imagined I could do. " Robin says that just a few years ago she could barely walk a couple of city blocks.