Chuck

Okay, everyone's been very polite (well, almost everyone), but it's time to talk about Thalia's hemangiomas.

Hemangi-what? You know. Those red blotches, one on her nose and the other on her lip.



Let's set the record straight. Hemangiomas are not permanently disfiguring. They are not malignant or otherwise scary. They're just clusters of would-be blood vessel cells that got lost and didn't know where to go.

They'll eventually turn kind of purple-gray, and then start fading away. Docs even have a formula for it: 30 percent are gone by age 3, 40 percent by age 4 and so on. If a kid is in the 10 percent that don't disappear by age 9, then the cosmetic surgeon brings the laser out. Done.

No one knows what causes them. For a while there was a theory, since discredited, that hemangiomas were stray cells left over from the placenta. Another time they were the subject of intense study by cancer researchers, who wanted to understand why these tumors only started growing a few weeks after birth. If we could figure out what triggered them, maybe we could figure out what caused cancer cells to reproduce. No go; the scientists found another explanation.

We call Thalia's hemangiomas her "chucks," as in "Chuck Mangione." For those of you too young to have lived through the glorious summer of '77, Mangione was the bearded and behatted trumpeter who had a hit with "Feels So Good," an easy listening instrumental.


He looks nothing like Thalia's chucks. Hers are much cuter.

But like her birthmarks' namesake, Thalia has also been making pleasing and loud noises lately. I'm too busy/lazy to get audio tracks on here, but rest assured we have professional-quality recordings of our daughter singing along with Debbie Harry.

She grabs. She laughs. IT'S ALIVE!!!