Saturday, December 5, 2009

Liam's cleft palate

Here is a picture of Liam's cleft palate. The cleft is only on the soft tissue so it should be a fairly simple surgery. He will most likely have the surgery when he is about 9 months old. We will start meeting with a team of specialists in the next few weeks. The reason they wait until then is because they want to hear him making sounds (words) to determine if the cleft has any impact on his speech and, if so, to see if the surgery helps.

Something else we've noticed, and you can see it in this photo, is his lip. It looks like his lip maybe had a cleft but then it filled in. And his left nostril looks slightly indented. We aren't sure if his lip and nostril are just that way because of birth (sometimes babies are a little "deformed" when they're born, but they fill out fine) or if it is due to any sort of cleft. We'll just have to wait and see.

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