Universitas Hospital to continue treatment of 25 Smile Week beneficiaries

Local News

─── 05:24 Tue, 12 Sep 2017

Photo: Pierce van Heerden

Bloemfontein - The procedures performed on 25 children with facial anomalies during Smile Week at Universitas Academic Hospital in Bloemfontein, have been deemed a resounding success, but it is not the end of the road for these children.

According to the Registrar at the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Universitas, Frits Spruyt, the hospital will continue to treat the children in the long haul.

The children, who came from parts of the Northern Cape, Free State and Lesotho, will continue to attend monthly cleft clinics, where these abnormalities are followed up.

He says the children won’t be seeing the specialists indefinitely but will be seeing them throughout the course of their childhood until they have gone through all their surgeries. Spruyt says that a cleft and palate reconstruction requires several surgeries.

Fits says with a cleft and palate reconstruction, a child will have different surgeries at a certain age. They repair the lip between 3 and 6 months, the palate between 9 and 18 months, they carry out a bone graft between 7 and 12 years.

Sometimes, they have to do revisions of a repair because children’s faces change over time.

One of the children who had a procedure done was 12-year-old Nkosana Ndaba. Spruyt says that Ndaba suffers from a disorder called Neurofibromatosis type 1, which he describes as a multisystem disorder characterised by the growth of benign and malignant nervous system tumours. The disease is also a genetic disorder, meaning that it is passed down from his parents.

Ndaba has a severe form of the disease. Spruyt goes on to say that their goal is to control the disease to improve his quality of life.

Head of the Department of Plastic Surgery at Universitas Hospital, Johannes Frederik Jooste, had emphasised last week that the children are the ones who matter. "We can pat ourselves on the back,” he says, but the spotlight needs to be firmly placed on the children who have to live with these deformities. Jooste had made specific note of Nkosana’s condition, saying he will never be cured: “We are only trying to hold back before the damn bursts, we cannot do much more for him.”

OFM News/Olebogeng Motse