A father ’s hope for his son’s life

Juan and Fredy in 2017. Juan was looking forward to having his son, Fredy, 14, finally come home to live with him. The teenager had been living under the care of his grandmother since he was a toddler. But on that long-awaited homecoming day, Juan was quickly jarred from feeling great joy to grave concern. “When I saw his face, one side looked very different from the other and his lip was swollen,” says Juan. “He admitted right away that his face had been hurting.” Juan remembered that the last time he’d seen his son — more than one year ago — Fredy’s face had looked slightly different then too. But whatever was happening, the situation had clearly become much worse since then. Something was undeniably very, very wrong. Just in time to get help Shortly after coming to live at his father’s house, Fredy was startled by an excruciating pain in the right side of his face. It seemed that, serendipitously, he had arrived back under his father’s care just in the nick of time. His local doctors immediately referred him to specialists at Boston Children’s Hospital. Fredy was initially seen by Dr. Reza Rahbar, associate otolaryngologist-in-chief in the Department of Otolaryngology, director of the Center for Airway Disorders and co-director of the Head, Neck and Skull Base Surgery Program. Today there are hardly any lingering signs of his ordeal, but Fredy had a large mass in the right side of his face when he first arrived at Boston Children’s. “Fredy h...
Source: Thrive, Children's Hospital Boston - Category: Pediatrics Authors: Tags: Diseases & Conditions Our Patients’ Stories Dr. Cameron Trenor Dr. Carolyn Rogers Dr. Darren Orbach Dr. Reza Rahbar Dr. Salim Afshar interventional radiology juvenile nasopharyngeal angiofibroma tumor Source Type: news