The PROBLEM for Monique Herrera's son was not life or death. She saw the need as one of enhancing her son's ability to learn and grow as a social being, without jeers and taunts. Mavric, her son, needed a new ear. But conventional medicine dictated that he wait until he was about 10.
He was born with what the 6-year-old calls "a little ear," and doctors call microtia, a congenital ear deformity. But getting to 10 with a deformed ear hardly bigger than a lobe could scar the young boy's personality, his mother worried.
One early incident confirmed her fears. The family was at a school recital. Mavric, then 1, was toddling around the auditorium when a third-grader pointed at him. "She said, 'Ewww, gross. Look at that baby,' " Herrera says. She wanted to protect her son from nine more years of that.
In Texas now, the family was living in Orange County when Mavric was born. Herrera had never heard of microtia, but what disturbed her was that when she went to a pediatric ear, nose and throat doctor, the technician administering a hearing test had never heard of it either.
"She didn't know where to tape the testing equipment," she said. Mavric's doctors had heard of it, but none had seen it. "You never want your child to be the first case a doctor has ever seen."
The physicians close to home offered a surgical technique decades old. It involved creating a new ear from material fashioned from the child's rib. The unacceptable catch for Herrera was that the procedure could be done when the child reached the age of about 10 to allow the ribs to grow and develop enough material to borrow.
"One doctor just told us not to worry, and come back in nine years," she says. Meanwhile, the boy's hearing was compromised in the deformed ear, and he'd also have to wait to have ear canal surgery and any chance of improved hearing. Herrera worried that his language development and learning would be slowed.
A second specialist told her to return every six months for checkups, but insisted nothing could be done for a decade.
Years went by, and as Mavric got closer to school age, his mother worried more that crucial years of educational and social development would pass before he could be helped.
Then her brother, who worked for the children's healthcare advocacy group Children's Miracle Network in Los Angeles, heard that Dr. John Reinisch, director of craniofacial and pediatric plastic surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, had developed a technique for children with microtia. Herrera got on the Internet, read about the technique and made an appointment.
