Ukraine’s doctor with colleagues from US fix serious facial defects of 4-year-old boy in Zimbabwe

The Lviv Regional Children's Clinical Hospital Ohmatdyt reported this, according to Espreso.

The 4-year-old Sky was diagnosed with a complex combined pathology - multiple face coloboma, clefts of the nose, corner of the mouth, palate, deformity of the bones of the facial skeleton and skull, hydrocephalus, missing arm and eye. The boy could not eat from birth - food leaked out of his mouth. Therefore, the first year of his life he was fed through a special probe, and then with a spoon.

"Sky's biological mother abused drugs. During her pregnancy, an ultrasound doctor informed her that her baby would have serious defects. That's when the powers of heaven intervened for the first time. Sky's mother was offered an abortion, but she refused and decided to give birth. Two years later, she died of an overdose. Sky was adopted by another family. The parents searched everywhere for help for their son, but this is a challenge in a country with only 4 maxillofacial surgeons and no experienced specialists who could help the boy," the Lviv medical institution said.

Local doctors then offered the parents the help of LEAP Global Missions doctors, who, under the guidance of American plastic surgeons, provide care for children with complex pathologies of the maxillofacial area. For the first time, Ukrainian surgeon Khrystyna Pohranychna from the Interregional Center for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, which operates on the basis of the Lviv Okhmatdyt, also took part in the program.

"This is a very difficult task because a lateral cleft lip (Tassier type 2,3,4,7,14) is considered rare (1:175,000-200,000 cases among live births). The boy was entrusted to the team of maxillofacial surgeons of the LEAP Global mission because his country does not perform such complex procedures. That's how Sky ended up at Sally Mugabe Hospital in Harare. The surgeons performed partial closure of the clefts - the nose, the corner of the mouth, and the palate, which was not easy because the nose was actually absent, it was formed from the little patient's own tissues, because, fortunately, he had nasal cartilage, nasal passages, but the anatomy of the nose was very distorted. The doctors made rotational flaps to turn the nostrils in the right direction, and performed plastic surgery on the commissures," the Okhmatdyt noted.

The boy is going to undergo rehabilitation and new surgeries for even better results.

"The boy has a hope to eat well and get a new quality of life," added Khrystyna Pohranychna.

• Earlier it was reported that in Lviv doctors saved a child with a severe congenital defect.