Content courtesy of Ivanhoe

It's a birth defect that causes hearing loss, speech problems and makes kids feel like they just don't fit in. About one in 9,000 babies are born with the ear deformity called microtia, but now surgeons have a way to grow them an ear.

Hunter Stephens is growing up fast, but from the day he was born, something was missing.

"We started counting fingers," his mom Tabitha Star Crenshaw recalled to Ivanhoe. "We started counting toes and didn't think to look at ears until they turned him on his other side, and so it was immediately obvious."

Stephens was born with microtia, a condition where the middle and outer ear don't develop normally.

"We've always told him what we believe is that when God was done making him," Crenshaw said. "He just kissed his ear and told him he was done and that was it."

Ann Schwentker, M.D., a pediatric plastic surgeon at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta says Stephens was a good candidate for a unique two-part procedure to reshape his ear, using his own ribs.

"We took cartilage out of his rib and I carved that in the shape of his ear to match the size and shape of the normal ear and I put that underneath the skin he had already, removing the misshapen cartilage he was born with," Dr. Schwentker explained.

Just three weeks after the final surgery, Stephens is proud to show off his new look and the spot where his new ear came from.

"Me with a whole new ear!" Stephens exclaimed to Ivanhoe.

He still faces challenges with his hearing and speech, but thanks to the surgery, his mom says he won't have to grow up feeling different.

"Meeting Hunter now, he's just like everybody else," she said. "He always has been and now he has the outside to match what he's always known on the inside."

Dr. Schwentker is one of only a handful of doctors in the United States who perform the two part ear reconstruction procedure, which was developed by a surgeon in Japan. She says the ideal time to do this surgery is around age eight, when our ears have reached 95-percent of their adult size.

More information:

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta
Brian Katzowitz, Public Relations
Brian.katzowicz@choa.org
http://www.choa.org