Tortoise and Hare...

A little background, before I share our progress. Dr. Fearon is a craniofacial surgeon out of, Dallas, Texas. He has performed more craniofacial surgeries, than anyone else in the country. He has operated on a friend of mine’s son and goes beyond being ‘the best of the best.’ Dr. Fearon's Web Site

Last Tuesday, I put an information packet together to send to Dr. Fearon. I also emailed him, to give him a brief background on Nathan and to let him know he should be getting a copy of Nathan’s CT scan’s and more thorough detailed information on him. Dr. Fearon does what I have seen no other doctor do. He highly encourages people to email him, ask questions, send pictures or scans and he will give an opinion as to what direction to go. He is incredibly well known in the cranio community for being someone who is willing to listen and help in any way he can.

The negative of having technology at our fingertips, is that it sometimes makes things too accessible. I checked my phone what seemed like every 30 minutes, Wednesday through Friday. In reality, I was probably checking ever couple of hours or so. Friday evening, I relented to the fact that it was a holiday weekend and would resume my ‘waiting by the phone’ scenario bright and early Tuesday morning. Sunday morning, my phone chirped to notify me I had a new email. Thinking it was an ad or spam, I looked at my email and suddenly my heart felt like it was going to beat out of my chest. My hands were shaking and I could barely think. Brian was out fishing with some friends, so it was just Nathan and I at home. It was the email I had been sitting on pins and needles waiting for. Here it was and I couldn’t even open it.

I called my parents who were on their way back from a well-deserved mini vacay in, Charleston, South Carolina. Through my unsteady voice I muttered ‘Fearon emailed me.’ I put ‘Buzz,’ ( i.e. Toy Story ), on the TV and went in our bedroom to talk with my parents. ‘Buzz’ would guarantee me at least 45 minutes of time to talk with my parents and go over what Fearon said.

The email was unbelievably informative. We were given more information and direction as to what to do with Nathan’s condition in a 10 minute email, than any doctor in an exam room had been willing to do or give. He listed out three possible scenarios that we could be looking at for Nathan, but definitely agreed that Nathan did need to have an eye exam done.

We were looking at Nathan having an eye exam done at the Naval Hospital on March 13. Our pediatrician, Dr. Willert, really wasn’t too thrilled with that idea for a couple of reasons. One being, how long we had to wait for the appointment. Two being the appointment was with a general ophthalmologist and not a pediatric ophthalmologist. We had a consecutive appointment with a pediatric ophthalmologist in Daphne, Alabama on March 30. Still our pediatrician wasn’t thrilled, but it was all we could do. Or so we thought. I was able to get in contact with a pediatric ophthalmologist in, Jacksonville. I was able to quickly brief him on Nathan’s condition and what it is we were looking for in our visit with him. His office was nothing short of amazing and was able to get us in, next Tuesday, February 28!!!

Hopefully, we will be able to get a referral from Dr. Willert’s office this week and we will be having the eye exam performed next week. From there, we will take the results from the ophthalmologist and contact Dr. Fearon. We want to at least get a consult with him, so that he can physically exam Nathan and give us his recommendations as to what he thinks we should do.

Progress is being made. Slow and steady progress, but after all it was the Tortoise who won the race by being slow and steady.