H is for Hemangioma

(If anyone is here looking for my Weekword post. It is over on my other blog Razzy's Corner. Check out all of this week's participants in Weekword at Silver Linings 4 Me.)

I struggled with trying to find a family related post for H, when Scott suggested hemangioma, and it seems fitting since I have spent so much of these last few months thinking about the one on the back of Zoey's head.

According to wikipedia a hemangioma is a benign self-involving tumor of the cells that line the blood vessels. They usually appear during the first weeks of life and resolve by age 10. They are the most common tumor in infancy. The word hemangioma comes from the Greek haema (meaning blood) and angeio (meaning vessel).

I first noticed Zoey's hemangioma when she was two months old and I immediately freaked out. I just knew she had cancer, so I made a doctor's appointment ASAP. Her pediatrician explained what it really was and eased most of our fears; however, he did stress the importance of monitoring it to make sure it didn't grow too fast and divert blood from her vital organs.

Here are pictures of it when we first noticed it

(You can hardly see anything)

Here are some pictures of it now

So as you can tell it has grown pretty substantially, which lead our pediatrician to referring us the Nationwide Children's Hospital's Hemangioma and Vascular Malformations Clinic. That appointment went really well and pretty much reassured me that we had nothing medically to be worried about. The doctor told us that hemangiomas grow the most between 3 and 6 months, so we are right in that window, and then start to decrease in size. The chances of it going away on it's own increase by 10% each year.

The main concern at this time is cosmetic, but the doctor said it wasn't interfering with hair growth, so if her hair grows out it will mostly cover it. Since it is such a large one, they recommended some things to try to reduce the speed that it grows. Right now we are rubbing a topical medicine on it twice a day. It's a strange medicine because taken orally it is a blood pressure medication and as eye drops is given for glaucoma. LOL! If this doesn't work then the next step is cortisone injections into it, which I really hope we don't have to do.

Zoey in her little hospital gown