If Charla Nash still had eyes, she too would be horrified.
The Connecticut woman who was mauled by a 200-pound chimpanzee revealed to the world Wednesday what was left of her face.
“The veil is lifted,” Oprah Winfrey said as she helped Nash remove her hat and coverings.
Nash displayed a remarkable resolve and insisted she was not angry about what happened to her.
“I don’t even think about it,” Nash said on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “And there’s no time for that anyways, because I need to heal, you know, not look backwards.”
Nash’s words – as well as her disfigured appearance – moved Winfrey.
“It is really shocking when you first look at her face, but after you sit with her, you begin to feel the power of her humanity,” she told her studio audience.
Nash was visiting her pal Sandra Herold in Stamford, Conn., last February, when Herold’s pet chimp, Travis, suddenly attacked her. The berserk beast tore off Nash’s nose, lips and eyelids before being shot dead by cops.
Nash, 56, is suing Herold for $50 million in damages and insists she doesn’t remember being attacked.
“I don’t want to” remember, she told Winfrey. “I want to get healthy. I don’t want to wake up with nightmares.”
Once an attractive blonde, Nash’s face is swollen and damaged beyond recognition, with a large mound of skin where her nose had been.
Nash told Winfrey she feels no pain and found out just a few weeks ago that the reason she cannot see is because she no longer has eyes. She said that’s a blessing, in a way.
“It’s like less for me to worry about if I don’t know,” she said.
Nash also lost her hands to Travis. She’s being treated at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and is forced to eat everything through a straw.
She dreams of one day eating pizza.
A face transplant candidate, Nash said what’s left feels like “patches of tape or gauze.” She said she knows by touching it that, “I have my forehead.”
Nash credited her brothers with helping her get through the ordeal and said she tries to walk every day, “even if I don’t feel good.” She says she covers her face “so I don’t scare people.”
“I’m the same person I’ve always been,” she said. “I just look different.”
Asked if she had any regrets, Nash said she wished she could spend more time with her daughter, Briana, who is heading to college next year.
“Her prom is coming up and I can’t pick out her gown,” she said. “So I can only hope that she picks out something appropriate to wear. You know how kids are. And that she had a good time there.”
Asked if the horrific experience taught her anything, Nash said “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
“Before, I was always really independent,” she said.
