EVERETT — For now, there’s still just a bump on the right side of Tae-Wau Ryu’s head.
But in late January, about two months after his surgery Thursday, the final piece of the process will be complete and the 8-year-old Korean boy will have a new ear.
Tae-Wau is one of three boys from South Korea who came to the Pacific Northwest last month. The boys suffer from microtia, a condition in which the ear, usually the right, doesn’t fully form at birth.
Tae-Wau sat Friday on a chair inside a cozy room in the pediatrics wing of the Providence Everett Medical Center’s Pacific Campus.
With a can of cola in hand, Tae-Wau watched cartoons while Dr. Ron Krueger looked over his work on the boy’s ear and gave instructions to his host mother, Cheryl Cash, before she took the boy home to Lynnwood.
Less than 24 hours earlier, Tae-Wau’s small frame lay on a surgical table with doctors hovering over him, extracting a small block of cartilage from the bottom of his left rib cage that would eventually become the foundation of his new ear.
Krueger, a Healing the Children board member and an ear, nose and throat specialist at The Everett Clinic, then carved the cartilage, using the traced contours of Tae-Wau’s left ear, which is fully developed, as a guide.
"It went great," Krueger said Friday. "We got a great piece of cartilage. It was carved up nicely, and it fit up well."
The sculpted cartilage was slipped under a thin layer of skin on the side of Tae-Wau’s head. A small vacuum, made of plastic tubes that maintain a light level of suction, helps adhere the skin to the new cartilage.
"It’s sort of like shrink-wrapping it," Krueger said.
The goal is for the skin and cartilage to marry, helping the cartilage continue as a "living, breathing" part of Tae-Wau’s body, Krueger said.
For two weeks, Tae-Wau will wear a loose dressing that looks like one side of an old stereo headphone set.
In January, after the ear is fully healed, Krueger will graft an oval piece of skin from Tae-Wau’s buttocks to create the rim around the newly carved cartilage. He will then cut the back of the ear to release it from the side of Tae-Wau’s head.
Tae-Wau’s day of surgery was relatively easy.
One of the other Korean boys, 6-year-old Yun-Min Lee, was at the hospital at the same time for a tooth extraction. Yun-Min, whose nickname is Pio, is staying with Linda Oppegaard on Camano Island and is scheduled for his microtia surgery on Monday.
The pair eased each other’s anxiety.
"They were in there making jokes and making all the nurses laugh," Cash said.
The night after wasn’t so easy. Tae-Wau was up much of the night and woke up for good at 4 a.m. Friday.
Min-Kyu Kim, the third of the visiting Korean boys, who is staying in Marysville, visited Friday morning and set up a Nintendo video game. Min-Kyu, 10, still had his right ear bandaged after having surgery last week.
Krueger, who, along with several other doctors and agencies, is donating his time, checked on Tae-Wau at 6 a.m. Friday. The doctor said the boy had no emotional reaction to the surgery.
"None," he said. "He hasn’t looked at it, he hasn’t seen it at all. He doesn’t like the dressing and the tubes, and all the fussing with it."
Krueger planned to see Tae-Wau again this morning.
"It’s just so I feel better, I have to look at it," he said. "You invest a lot into it, and you want to make very sure it’s going as you expect."
Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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