See Girl Smile After Having Surgery to Fix Facial Deformity
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Dr. Gregory Levitin/Mount Sinai Roosevelt Hospital(NEW YORK) — Nearly two weeks after undergoing a lengthy operation to fix a facial malformation, Kaitlin Nguyen is again smiling.
The 3-year-old girl was born with a large facial lymphatic malformation that bulged out from under her cheek.
Earlier this month, Kaitlin underwent surgery led by Dr. Gregory Levitin, director of the Vascular Birthmark Center at Mount Sinai Roosevelt in New York. Levitin said the girl bounced back remarkably well from the five-hour surgery.
“She’s fantastic…she got her stitches [out], she was so playful and right back to her usual self,” Levitin said after seeing Kaitlin in a follow-up appointment today. “Her mom was having a hard time to stop her from being too active.”
An anonymous donor helped pay for Kaitlin’s life-changing surgery.
Levitin said his team was able to remove 80 percent of the lymphatic malformation. The surgeon worked carefully to preserve the facial nerves so the surgery doesn’t do more harm than good.
“We want to remove abnormal tissue but preserve normal tissue, including that nerve,” Levitin said. “It’s a needle of hay in a haystack.”
Kaitlin’s Los Angeles-area family had tried to arrange surgery before when she was 1, but doctors became stymied by the complex structure of her illness. Now Levitin said Kaitlin’s mom is beaming at her progress.
Levitin said the girl still has some swelling that will go down by another 20 to 30 percent in the coming weeks. While the main surgery is over, Levitin said, she may need a few more procedures in the future to soften scar tissue and to help make her smile more symmetrical.
They’ll “wait six months to a year and see how she does to give her a chance to recover and be a normal girl,” Levitin said.
He said he would likely perform another smaller surgery then to help fix the muscles that had been moved or stretched by the lymphatic malformation.
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