A Big Mistuck

And $854,000 in damages

When the nurse removed the bandages from her stomach, Virginia O'Hare, 42, could scarcely believe her eyes. "The stitches weren't even closed. Blood was oozing, and I saw this hole on the left side of my stomach." As she told a Manhattan court, her belly button had been displaced half an inch to the left, and a thick scar wound across her abdomen from thigh to thigh. Her doctor's promise to give her "a nice flat, sexy belly" with a routine operation called a lipectomy, or tummy tuck, had turned into a nightmare.

Literally coming apart at the seams, as her lawyer put it, O'Hare brought a $1.5 million suit against her surgeon, Howard Bellin. On the stand, O'Hare testified that the 1974 operation had reduced her from a self-confident, aggressive owner of her own employment agency, earning $45,000 a year, to a selfconscious, emotional cripple, barely able to make $18,000. (She has since had corrective surgery by another doctor.) Bellin, whose flamboyant personal style (a contessa wife, visits to Manhattan's Studio 54 disco, a personal p.r. man) irritates some of his colleagues, admitted that the operation was not up to his usual high standards but insisted that it was "cosmetically acceptable." Instead, he attacked O'Hare as perennially dissatisfied, schizoid and a cosmetic-surgery junkie. She has had nine nose jobs, an eyelid lift, a face lift and hair transplant, said Bellin, who had performed two of those operations, as well as eyelid surgery for her boyfriend.

Last week, after eight days of weighing the evidence--including photos--the jury of four men and two women took only four hours to ease the scarred O'Hare's pain. For this suffering, plus loss of income and earning power, plus medical expenses, it awarded her precisely $854,219.61, a stunning amount that headline writers could not resist calling variously NAVEL VICTORY, BATTLE OF MIDWAY, and BELLY LAUGH. Hours later, patient and doctor ran into each other at Manhattan's "21" Club; she was there to celebrate, he to ponder an appeal and "the absurdity of it all."

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