Ben's history

Benjamin was born with a birth defect called hemifacial microsomia and microtia. Which means one side of your face is noticeably smaller than the other side and the microtia part means the ear was not completely formed. His jaw and mandible is significantly shorter than the other side so if it is not corrected soon, later in life he will develop lock jaw. His "little ear" was farther down on his face and not developed like the other ear, and he has no ear canal. All of this is on his right side of his face. No one knows why this has happened it does not run in either side of mine or my husbands families, I did not take any illegal substances, did not drink, did not smoke, it was a totally normal pregnancy. It was just a sporadic incident. We have since had a little girl and she is totally healthy. He is a normal kid just like any other rambunctious boy. He is very intelligent, and very well loved by everybody that knows him. He has no care in the world. He is now six years old and I believe he has a pretty good self esteem. I home school him because we started ear reconstruction on Oct. 8, 2008 at Shriners hospital, so me and my husband thought it was in his best interest if we taught him at home so he wouldn't have to miss school and deal with social pressures as he was going through surgery. This surgery consists of 4 stages, the fist would be cartilage grafting, then skin grafting, then lobule repositioning, and last a tragus. What he would be left with would be a brand new ear to look more like an ear than what he had. Unfortunately he has had four surgeries and his ear in my opinion does not even look like an ear. After this last surgery I went to see our primary care physician and one of the nurses said, "oh these ears look fantastic when they are done we have a patient here with the same thing your son has and I can't even tell the difference between his two ears". So I said, "well he has had 4 surgeries and is almost done". She then paused and said, "oh let me see if I can get that number of the other boys surgeon for you, maybe you can call him and see if he can help Ben." When I got home that evening I got online and started googling before and after pictures of kids that had gone through the same surgeries as Ben. When I was done I was literally in tears. I could not believe how wonderful and natural these kids ears looked and when I looked at my son I felt guilty, how could I have not looked at these before! Why didn't I do more research, I just trusted that Shriners would take care of it. Immediately I contacted these doctors and sent pictures of Ben to them. The first doctor I talked to was Dr. Bonilla from Texas (I live in CA) and he gave me Dr. Brent's number and Dr. Reinisch's number (they are from CA also). Dr. Brent was the first to see Ben. When he examined Ben's ear, he said, "I am saddened by this". There wasn't much he could do because of all the scarring done to the skin, and the cartilage was donated cartilage and so incredibly thick and not shaped well there was nothing he could do to make it look better. His advice was to take out all the cartilage that was put in and let him heal for at least a year, then he would look and see if his skin was healthy enough to start all over from stage 1. He said we only had a 50/50 shot of it being successful. If it was not successful or if the skin still was bad then our only other option would be a prosthetic ear. It definitely was not what I wanted to hear. Our next visit was with Dr. Reinisch who does the medpor implant option. When he looked at Ben he said that the ear was not in the right spot and he measured from the corner of his eye to the ear on his developed side and said that it should be put the same distance on the other side bc you are measuring from the eye, he said his hemifacial microsomia has nothing to do with putting the ears in the correct spot. Ben's "new ear" was only half the distance of what it should have been which is something I have always said and noticed but the surgeon who did Ben's surgery said it only looked that way because of his hemifacial microsomia. Dr. Reinisch showed us a power point presentation of his work and his before and after pictures and we were very impressed. Medpor is a plastic implant instead of using his rib cartilage and so the technique and procedure is so different even though Ben has all the scar tissue it didn't matter he would still be able to help him no ifs, ands, or butts. I am very happy we found Dr. Reinisch, so now here we are present day, surgery day is April 28, 2010. We are all very excited and Ben said all he wants is to have two ears like everyone else.