Addy recently underwent her forty-fourth laser treatment for her port wine stain!

Port wine stains like Addy’s need to be treated regularly, much like weed-whacking in a garden or yard. This is because the crazy overgrowth of blood vessels that originally created the port wine stain in utero also continues to grow with the rest of the body throughout childhood.

The laser treatment, in simplest terms (because I’m a mom, not a doctor), shoots a hyper-focused beam of light at the port wine stain; that light is absorbed by the blood vessels, which heat up and die. (Their bursting is what causes crazy purple bruising after a laser treatment.)

But port wine stains vary in their depth and breadth. If the error occurred early in utero while the body was developing, then the port wine stain will be deeper and/or cover more skin; these are harder to treat. If the error occurred later, then the port wine stain will be shallower, and probably smaller in size; these are easier to treat.

The lasers can only sizzle up & kill the top layer of blood vessels. So a deep port wine stain with a lot of layers of overgrown blood vessels will be tougher to treat; they’ll appear to be “resistant” to treatment, when in fact there are just a ton of layers to zap through.

It doesn’t help that the child’s natural growth fuels further blood-vessel growth, too — and that’s why port wine stains get thicker and darker and (and perhaps bring more complications) with age.

So between the deep layers and the constant growth, Addy’s treatment schedule has looked a lot like weed-whacking in an overgrown garden. We would take a whack at the overgrowth of weeds, then wait a month, and then take another whack at the next layer.

Addy’s first treatment happened when she was five weeks old, under full anesthesia. She continued to go to Children’s Hospital outpatient surgery almost every month for the first few years of her life, in order to get laser treatments for the port wine stain on her face.

Her stain was stubborn and deep! If you’re reading this and you have a baby with a port wine stain, please don’t fret — many port wine stains are NOT as deep as Addy’s, and they can go away with fewer treatments.

(And if you’re still worried that it won’t go way, you can read about Addy’s fabulous encounters with other humans here, here, and here, which only happened because her port wine stain was so visible! There are perks to being noticeable!)

Now that Addy is sixteen, she’s decided that she loves the shape and shade of her port wine stain, and wants to leave it just as is.

This means that she’ll need an occasional ‘maintenance’ treatment to contain (weed-whack!) its growth, but otherwise the treatment schedule has slowed down to maybe once a year.

This most recent laser treatment was unique: it was done in the clinic, and not in the hospital under full anesthesia.

This was new for us; her first 43 laser surgeries had all done at Children’s Hospital under full anesthesia.  (This is because squirmy small children + big loud blinding laser machines pointed at their faces = sedation!)

For laser treatment #44, she saw the same dermatologist, but we went to his clinic for a quick procedure (no anesthesia).

Addy was a little bit scared going into this treatment, even at her age.  She was nervous that the laser machine would be loud and would hurt her face. 

She wasn’t wrong.  The machine makes a loud zapping sound, which is a bit unnerving when your eyes are covered with a protective shield so you can’t see what’s coming.  And the laser feels like a rubber band snapping the face a hundred times a second, so it’s not exactly painless.

But it was SO fast.  She was done in about fifteen minutes.  Easy.

And being a teenager, she grabbed my phone and took a selfie.  Because, cool face.

So while she definitely prefers to be knocked out cold for the procedure, she appreciated the speed with which we were done. And there was no ‘anesthesia hangover’ (which can make a person a little wobbly emotionally and otherwise for a few days afterward). And there was no need for a pre-op physical (which is necessary within the week before they’ll be going under full anesthesia). I appreciated the simplicity of it all.

There are definitely perks to both treatment approaches (under anesthesia and in-clinic). Sometimes insurance guidelines or treatment availability dictates one approach over another, and you may not have too many options.

But either way, they work, and we’re grateful for it. 

If you’re looking ahead to treatment options and you want to get into this a little bit deeper, please leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have!