Sunday, November 14, 2010

by Mark Beckwith

Today was mostly uneventful.  Megan complained of a splitting headache, quickly controlled by a Lortab, and there were some fun histrionics with specialists.

All things considered, the best part was washing my girl's hair.  She truly could not understand that her incision would not be detectable.  She looks great!  This made her very happy.  You can tell from her smile in the photo.

We walked to the cafeteria three times, impressing everyone as usual.  We borrowed movies and got on facebook and played with the iTouch, etc.  I worked on my Messiah score for my two upcoming Messiahs on December 12 and December 19.  Somebody said, since there are two Messiahs, "Why don't we vote to have one be female while we're at it? Then they can have all sorts of little Messiahs, and save the world through music."

I liked this a lot.  Saving the world through music - I love it!

The studly neurosurgeons commented parenthetically about the wimpy neurologists.  I think it's envy, frankly.  After all, the neurologist was the one who was out of town for the day as an invited speaker at a conference  :)  Then again, it was the surgeons' confidence in their masterfully impenetrable water-proofing of Megan's incision, and their cocky insistence that I go ahead and wash Megan's hair, almost as if it was a dare, that I decided to take a leap of faith on it.  I know Megan is glad to have her hair back where it belongs.

The part I liked the most was holding my own in a conversation about genomic analysis with their genetics guru who managed to chase us down, once he realized he had a giant nevus in his realm.  They sought permission to phenotype Megan's parents and draw blood for a chromasomal microarray analysis.  I suspect they want to do a case report on our girl. I was tempted to just give them Heather's number (Heather is the Queen Bee in this aspect of the work of Nevus Outreach) but instead I name-dropped "Greg Barsh" to great effect.

By comparison, the neurosurgeons tried incorrectly to combine the words "nevus" and "syndrome" to sound like they knew what they were talking about.  It made me chuckle to myself.  We are all human.

Let me be clear: my family would not be enjoying the current happiness if it were not for BOTH neurologists and neurosurgeons, and about a hundred other people on the staffs (staves?) of Le Bonheur Children's Hospital and Semmes-Murphey Neurologic and Spine Institute.  This has been a really flawless deal from start to finish.

With that I will stand down; tomorrow brings the return to Oklahoma, and our return to some semblance of regular life once more.  I will take a break from the daily updates, but you know where to find me.  Thanks for following along with us.  Your thoughts, prayers and support mean a lot, and we could not have done it without you.