Marc Summers, No Brain Damage But “Half My Face Was Wiped Out!”

As host of Nickelodeon’s Double Dare, Marc Summers got used to being covered in a variety of slimy substances.

But the 60-year-old, who currently hosts Food Network’s Unwrapped, was still unprepared to wake up after a car accident and have “blood all over me”.

Summers was a passenger in a taxi cab in Philadelphia last week when it hydroplaned during a downpour, and he went smashing face first into the hard plastic seat partition.

According to People magazine:

Everything on the left side [of my face] from my eye socket down was just wiped out. My eye socket got all swollen. I’m having trouble seeing completely out of the left eye … There’s lots of titanium and screws in my face.

But he added:

I was pretty lucky that I didn’t have brain damage.

Summers underwent 4 hours of plastic surgery to repair the damage, and his surgeon feels that after the swelling goes down in a few weeks, he’ll be “a new guy.”

In 1999, Summers revealed that he has obsessive compulsive disorder (Howie Mandel has also revealed suffering from the same disorder). Summers went public about his condition on various television shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Today Show. Summers co-wrote a book with Dr. Eric Hollander about his experience, called Everything In Its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Summers also participated in a series of videos for Freedom from Fear, a non-profit organization with the goal of addressing anxiety disorders and other related behavioral disorders.

25 Fascinating Facts About Faces

1. Our face is made up of 14 bones:

• Inferior nasal concha (2)
• Lacrimal bones (2)
• Mandible (Jawbone)
• Maxilla (2)
• Nasal bones (2)
• Palatine bones (2)
• Vomer
• Zygomatic bones (2)

2. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.

3. Your nose is about the size of your thumb.

4. There are 43 muscles in our face.

5. This strongest muscle in the human body is the masseter. It sits at the back of the jaw. It is the muscle that is used to chew food.

6. The facial muscles are the only muscles in the human body that are directly attached to the skin. They are what makes the foundation of your face unique.

7. Your tongue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end.

8. It takes 17 muscles to smile, 43 to frown.

9. The human face can create somewhere between 5,000-10,000 expressions.

10. People across the globe express emotions with the same basic facial expressions.

11. Human beings are designed to interpret and understand facial expressions at lightning speed, at large distances and with great accuracy.

12. Scientific research has determined that smiling is the most easily recognizable facial expression from a great distance. The research concludes that a smile can be recognized from upwards of 147 feet away.

13. Genuine facial expressions are almost always symmetrical.

14. A UC-San Francisco researcher has identified 19 different kinds of smiles. The researcher has classified them into two groups: polite “social” smiles and sincere “felt” smiles. Social smiles use the fewest number of muscles, and felt smiles use more muscles on both the left and right sides of the face.

15. It is involuntary movements around the eyes that distinguish a genuine smile from a fake one.

16. The hardest part of the human body is the enamel that covers the teeth.

17. Each nostril of a human being register smell in a different way. Smells that are made from the right nostril are more pleasant than the left.

18. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

19. If you go blind in one eye you only lose about one fifth of your vision but all your sense of depth.

20. Women blink twice as many times in men.

21. If all the eyelashes a human sheds over an average lifetime were lined up, end to end, they would measure over 98 feet in length.

22. Although eyebrows are one of our most expressive facial features, they also keep moisture out of our eyes when sweating or walking around in the rain.

23. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body.

24. The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.

25. The skin on your lips is 200 times more sensitive than your fingertips.

For more info, go to the Resounding Health Casebook on the topic.