Noah is our four year old, number three of four boys.  Next Wednesday he’ll be going in for a biopsy – the poor kid is so used to going to the doctor it’s not even phasing him (yet).  When he was one he had to have surgery on his right eye; he has Ptosis, a condition that causes the muscle in his eyelid to not work.  More recently, he’s also been diagnosed with a heart arrhythmia; it’s not bad enough that they’re overly worried about it, but is a very regular heartbeat irregularity, and he’ll have to continue to have follow up appointments for it.  This visit and the biopsy is for an inexplicable something on his face; going from above his left eye, down to the bottom of his nose.  It’s hard to see it in the photo above, but in person it’s pretty noticeable.  It appeared about a year and a half ago and slowly grew to what it is now.  It looks like a rash, or a black eye, but it’s not – the doctors haven’t seen anything like it before and are at somewhat of a loss, hence the biopsy.  The suspicion is that it’s something vascular, but we won’t know until they take a piece out and run a battery of tests on it.

The problem is, while it’s not hurting him in any way, it has been hard for him.  People see us with four boys, and it looks like he has a black eye – that’s a recipe for a funny story, right?  Almost every time we go out, someone asks him what happened to his eye, at which point he usually shuts down.  Literally looks down and stops talking – the poor kid is tired of it.  Sometimes we get hints of his frustration – on Friday we were taking him in for his pre-biopsy appointment with the doctor.  I woke up to him running up to me in my bed, saying, ‘Daddy! Today the doctor gonna take my rash away!’  He was so excited; I had to explain that no, we were just going to talk to the doctor to get some ideas on what to do – the reality is, we could get the biopsy, they could test it, and still have no idea what it is, where it came from, or what to do.  It’s just sad to see him tired of it.

On the one hand, it’s such a relief that none of these things is life threatening, or fatal or anything like that.  We’re blessed with incredibly healthy kids.  On the other hand, it’s hard to see all of the health issues lumped on our one son and as he gets older, it’s hard seeing him feeling self conscience about it and wishing for something to work.