Our story begins on May 24th 2012 at 2:17am. That is when we first saw our beautiful son Dylan after a very long and hard labor of 72 + hours. When we both laid eyes on him we were flooded with emotions; joy, excitement, nervous, exhaustion, just about anything and everything you can think of we felt.
Immediately after he was born we knew Dylan was special. The Midwife laid him across Nikki's chest and Nikki immediately asked what was wrong with him... You see Dylan had dark spots all over him and his whole back was black. The Midwife just looked at us both and said I don't know but we will find out.
He was then sent to the NICU so that they could better understand what was going on and to give us answers. In the mean time I text a picture of him to my sister and told her I needed answers. Macy (best sister I could have ever asked for ) then called me and told me she was on the way and she had answers before me before the hospital did.
What we found out was that Dylan was born with a rare condition called Giant Congenital Melanocytic Nevi. Only 1 in ever 500,000 kids born have this condition. A Nevus is basically a birthmark and in his case a rather giant birthmark. After learning what his condition was called I was looking up everything I could about this. I very quickly found the Nevus group I have come to love called Nevus Outreach (www.Nevus.org). I also talked to Megan Fields (She is wonderful) that day on their help line so that I could start to find out the steps I needed to take to make Dylan's life easier.
The pediatrician in the hospital referred us to the best pediatric dermatologist in GA Dr. Mary Spraker. As you can imagine (if you know me well) I was on the phone immediately with her office trying making our first appointment. This did not happen as quickly as I had wanted it due to Dr. Spraker being out on vacation, so what did I do? I got an appointment with just anyone I could in the Emory network so that I could get my foot in the door. Dylan was less than 1 week old and he had already seen a dermatologist and a pediatric Plastic Surgeon.
More on all of those appointments soon.... For now just know that this was just the beginning of something special!!!
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