Julie's Boggle

Tomorrow is finally the day on which Jonathan is going to get his lip repaired at Great Ormond Street Hospital. (The earliest they would do the surgery is at 3 months but we got them to hold off because of our holiday to SA.)

Fortunately Jon has only a partial cleft and it does not affect his palate at all. So all going well, this is the only operation he’ll need while he’s still a baby. The next one, to repair the small gap in his gum, will be when he’s 8 or 9 years old.

* For those who do not want to read the grisly details, skip the next paragraph! *

The operation will apparently take 2.5 hours and during that time they make two cuts, one on each side of the cleft. Then the two sides are pulled together and a lot of complicated joining is done to create one unbroken set of muscle surrounding the mouth. The scar is arranged to be over the left-hand ridge above his lip and the outer stitching is done with very fine thread to minimise scarring. Lastly they’ll put in some stitches in his nose to pull the left side in slightly.

It was a lot easier thinking about having all this done when he was still growing inside me and not the gorgeous little chap we’ve come to know and love. We’ve got so used to the look of his face and his lip — to us it’s just our cute little boy, not a genuine defect. But if he didn’t have this operation, it would affect his speech development, so it really does have to be done. And sooner is better from that perspective.

The hospital anticipate a quick recovery and are prepared to send him home as soon as he is feeding properly, probably the following day. I then need to take him back next week for them to remove the outer stitches — this is done under sedation.

The advantage of Jon being so young at this point is that he’s not going to be as introspective and sorry for himself as an adult would be under similar circumstances. Yes, the poor little guy will have to get through a fair amount of pain and discomfort over the next two weeks, but without the capacity to anticipate future pain (i.e. when the painkillers wear off), he’s probably a lot better off.

We’ve been very comforted to know that we have lots of friends and family praying for Jon as we go into this, thank you for your support. We’ll definitely be posting up more news and pictures soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Jonathan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.