Carol Raines feels dramatically better than the last time Dr. Kent saw her. In May, she was in pain, barely able to open her mouth.

“I have nightmares, some nights I wake up screaming,” Carol recalled, as she faced eating through a feeding tube or starving.

A gunman killed her husband and shot her in the jaw 28 years ago inside their home Uptown on Cadiz Street.  Over the years, the damage from that gunshot caused her jaw to lock up, led to horrible, chronic headaches.

The solution would be expensive -- total replacement of both jaw joints -- the titanium replacement joints alone cost $14,000 thousand dollars.

“It's required.  And it's the only option,” said Dr. Kent

Ironically, the state would gladly pay if the gunman -- now serving life in Angola -- who killed her husband and shot her needed the same surgery.

Dr. Kent says he's done that very same surgery on inmates at taxpayer expense. But Carol's insurance and Medicare balked at paying for her surgery.

“We can operate on prisoners, we sure ought to be able to take care of these people,” said Dr. Kent.

Several viewers responded to our story that aired on Eyewitness News about Carol with offers to pay for the surgery themselves. 

“And I just thought that was wonderful that someone would offer that kind of money to someone they don't even know,” said Carol.  

Carol has coverage from Medicare and United Healthcare. She insisted they should cover her surgery.  

Yet over the previous year, she said her pleas for coverage went nowhere.  But when Eyewitness News questioned why inmates are entitled to better medical care than people with insurance, things changed.

“What it took was first of all was your contacting us so we could become much more involved in what was going on,” Roger Rollman, a representative from United Healthcare.

United Healthcare has agreed to provide full coverage.

Rollman says United Healthcare contacted the maker of the titanium prosthesis Carol needs to assure the firm that United would pay for the device.  And it gave similar assurances to University Hospital. 

“The impact on the member financially is going to be minimal to nothing,” Rollman said.

The surgery was a couple weeks ago and took seven hours. 

Dr. Kent says he removed Carol's damaged joints, wired her teeth together to give her the best possible bite and then put in the new custom made titanium jaw joints.  

“She's going to have a good opening,” Dr. Kent.  “And like I told her, ‘You’re going to be able to open like an alligator.’”

“Each day I'm feeling a little bit better,” Carol said.    

Her recuperation includes using a device once every hour to exercise her jaw to increase the amount she can open her mouth.

“No, this doesn't hurt,” she said after demonstrating the jaw exercise.  “It helps me to move my jaw.  Doctor says it's like a football player.” 

“It's like the orthopedic surgeons when they operate on the knee and they get the knee swinging, you know, football? Same thing.  It's what we call passive therapy,” Dr. Kent said.  

She's already able to open her mouth about twice as wide as she could before. But she has other serious needs. That gunshot wound caused her to lose most of her back teeth 

“They basically just fell out like little popcorns,” she said.

When she can open her mouth normally, she won't be able to chew food very well without those back teeth. Her insurance doesn't cover replacing those teeth.

But a dentist who teaches other professionals how to make natural looking ceramic crowns wants to help and has agreed to donate his services.

“What I will be doing is rehabilitating her mouth with crowns and veneers and implants,” Dr. Johnny Schwartz said.  

Dr. Schwartz estimates his services alone, making crowns that another doctor will implant, could run as high as $50,000.

“And we'll be working on every tooth in her mouth to get her balance and form and function, so she can smile once again and be confident about her appearance and, at the same time, be able to eat,” Dr. Schwartz said.   

“I feel so lucky,” Carol said.  “It's a wonderful feeling.  How do you thank somebody for that?  I always figured that I would die with no teeth in the back and just trying to get by as best I could.”

Schwartz says a big part of what motivates him is the conviction that inmates should not be entitled to better medical care than the innocent people they turn into victims of crime.

That's an issue in which Carol Raines intends to take an active role as soon as she can.

“I want to start working to try to help other victims, so they don't have to go through what I’ve endured,” Carol said.

Months from now, when this is all over, Carol Raines will be able to eat normally.

And she'll have something else she lost when that gunman shot her 28 years ago: a beautiful smile.