A few days ago, the chief physician’s cell phone WeChat received several pictures of the child and his family from a mother of a child with cleft lip and palate, and a group photo of the child standing on the stage for a singing competition, followed by a birthday message from the mother to her ten-year-old son.
The message reads: “Son, in your tenth year in this world, mom suddenly found that you have really grown up! You’re no longer the petite baby who cries out in pain when you fall down, you know that the sweat and tears you hold back is for that moment of awesomeness! You’re no longer the pet child who is held in the arms of your parents and wants the best of everything, you understand that you have to be thankful for what you get, and that you get what you give! Your slightly childish performance let me see another glowing you, and the gift you secretly prepared made me tear up. Watching you grow from a delicate child to a shy teenager, watching you from holding my hand and toddling to running away from me to the colorful world. I understand that my initial task of bringing you into this world has been completed, and in the future I would like to turn into the wind, so that you can sail away to a wider world full of confidence, kindness and courage!”
For more than 30 years, he has operated on more than 10,000 cleft lip and palate cases, and in the last decade or so, he has participated in the Smile Train charity clinic and performed more than 500 free surgeries on children. Last year, due to his achievements and contributions in cleft lip and palate treatment and charity activities, he was elected as the director of the Oral Cranio-Maxillofacial Department of the China Medical Committee of Operation Smile China Foundation.
Although he can no longer remember the names of each child, Wang can clearly remember the condition of each child and the surgical procedure, as well as the anxiety and efforts of the family. Director Wang recalls that this child had a very serious bilateral cleft lip and palate, and the surgery was very successful at that time. For children with cleft lip and palate, successful surgery and timely post-operative speech correction are very important. Wang Guomin exclaimed that the mother was very impressive, as the child had not been to a professional institution for speech correction training after the surgery, and the child was able to achieve such unimpeded pronunciation because of the mother’s own efforts and persistence! She gave her child not only a life, but also more efforts and efforts in speech correction and psychological development than normal people.
There are still about 25,000 new children with cleft lip and palate in China every year, and one new cleft face every 2.5 minutes worldwide, which is about 600 new children a day, and these children need to undergo as many as one to five surgeries and decades of subsequent rehabilitation. As a doctor, for the sake of the child’s smile and the happiness of more parents and families, it is worthwhile to be busy and tired. However, although China’s cleft lip and palate diagnosis and treatment technology has been among the forefront in the world, there is still a lack of perfect mechanisms such as surgical standards for the treatment of cleft lip and palate, and the development of treatment level is still very uneven. We hope that with the support of the relevant departments, we will be able to provide more information on this issue. We hope that with the support of relevant departments, a mature “Shanghai model” of cleft lip and palate treatment mechanism can be formed as soon as possible.
Looking out the photos of other children in his phone, Director Wang said, “This is a child who had surgery in Kaili, Guizhou a few days ago; this is a child from Hong Kong whose mother came to my clinic with an ultrasound when she was a mother-to-be, and the child’s surgery was successful; recently there was another child from South Africa whose mother also came to the clinic during pregnancy, and I will definitely operate for this child. I will definitely operate on this child.” In the photo, the child’s smile before and after the surgery is so innocent, yet so different.