Great Ormond Street
Monday, 23rd July 2007 by Julie
A week ago last Friday, we took Jonathan for his first post-natal visit to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children to discuss his cleft lip.
G.O.S. is a specialised children’s hospital which services the Greater London area and we count ourselves really lucky to have it as our default hospital.
With its location in central London, getting there with a new baby was quite an undertaking (especially for the recently Caesareaned) and Tom, whose paternity leave had run out on the Monday, took the day off work to help out.
Once there, they weighed and measured Jonathan, then we were ushered into a roomful of specialists. These people are the central part of the weekly clinic which sees all sorts of cleft lip and palate cases in children from babies to teenagers. The team includes a surgeon, orthodontist, ENT specialist, paediatrician and a speech therapist.
On our visit, the others looked on as Jonathan was examined first by the surgeon, and then by the orthodontist. His cleft lip was described by the surgeon as fairly minor, to be fixed around three months as we’d expected. In our case, this will be late October when we get back from SA.
The orthodontist then prepped us to expect an irregularity in Jon’s left incisor (it could be missing, doubled or skew), because that’s where there’s some bone missing from his alveolar ridge. This will be fixed though when he’s about 8 or 9 years old, before his permanent tooth comes in.
Once the specialists were done with us, we had a briefing with one of the clinic’s two nurses who covered details of the lip operation’s logistics – time, duration, pre-op visit etc.
And then our last stop was over at the Imaging Lab where they took several close-up photos of Jon’s head and the cleft from various angles.
We made our way back home via Oxford Street for some shopping for baby-related sundries and then it was finally back on the Underground where I could rest my weary, under-exercised legs!
