At the conference, in the lobby of a Jewish school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I noticed a woman with a boy with slightly shaggy hair and approached them. "Is this Michael?" I asked. The mom, Ann, said yes, and I introduced myself. We'd exchanged emails on the microtia message board because her son has hemifacial microsomia too. He's ten years old and hasn't had any surgery.
I asked where they were from and where they were staying. Michael looked bored and then looked away. They shuffled off toward the line to meet the doctors. I mentally smacked myself in the forehead, V8-style. I was sure the kid was like, "Wonder how she recognized me. Hm, could it be my crooked face?" Truthfully, I just picked him out because he was older than most of the kids there.
A short while later we had our four minutes with Dr. Brent in a stairwell. He seemed vaguely James Cromwell-ish, or James Herriot-ish. Calm. I showed him Charlie's ear and told him what Dr. Eavey had said. "I would have to use rib cartilage," Dr. Brent said. "He would need three operations, not til age six." We thanked him. (The camera was on the wrong setting.)
Everyone gathered in the cafeteria. Uncle Jack invited all the kids who have had their ears done by Dr. Brent to come to the front. "What is your name?" he asked each one. "Who did your surgery?" "Dr. Brent," each kid said. "Did it hurt?" asked Uncle Jack. Each kid replied: "No!" Charlie is obviously way too little to understand, but I bet the parents of four- or five-year-olds wanted to run up and hug Uncle Jack for that.
Dr. Brent showed lots of slides of ears. "I can't tell you how many little girls' ears I've pierced," he said. "That's the last part of the surgery. The girls all want earrings. The boys want to wear sunglasses." He showed slides of the same patients over twenty years' time. The ears grew.
He believes--and I knew this from his web site--that kids with microtia don't notice their ears are different until they are three and a half. They don't particularly care until they are seven or eight, unless their parents are extremely anxious about it. It's my job not to be anxious. Quit laughing!
Dr. Brent practices on potatoes. He showed slides of dozens of ears carved out of potatoes. He's also an artist. He showed slides of some of his sculptures, including the metal polar bears at the San Diego Zoo that I have photos of Summer sitting on when she was two.
We listened to the next doctor talk about repairing the middle ear to restore hearing. We drifted out to the lobby while the hearing-aid doctors spoke. I found Ann and Michael again. Michael had brightened up; maybe it was the chips and soda they'd put out in the cafeteria. We talked about skiing and snowboarding; his younger brother; the tan he acquired when he moved from England to Florida. I asked him if he ever had trouble hearing his teachers in school. "Never," he said confidently.
At the end of the day we felt so lucky to have met Dr. Brent and gotten a read on him without having to fly to California. The best thing for me, though, was meeting Michael. He wasn't thinking about his somewhat crooked, but good-looking, face. It's his face; he's used to it. He was just being a normal, well-adjusted ten-year-old boy, bored by grown-ups and their boring grown-up talk. I hope Charlie will someday be bored out of his gourd, daydreaming about skateboarding down the sidewalks of Manhattan instead of obsessing about his face. I think it can happen. All I have to do is not obsess about his face.
No problem!
