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Cam, who was born a few minutes after his twin brother in April, underwent his first of three surgeries in July. Here he is photographed before and after the procedure.
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A baby born with a cleft palate can smile correctly for the first time after undergoing a life-altering surgery to rebuild his mouth.
Little Cam Martin, 6 months old, looks unrecognizable after a plastic surgeon spent five hours repairing his upper lip and gum.
Cam was born two minutes after his twin brother Jack on April 3, parents Matt and Sara Martin.
But unlike his brother, Cam had a cleft palate, which meant that his upper lip, upper jaw bone, and chewing gum were split.
The defect meant that Cam was unable to breastfeed and had to be fed through a bottle with a special valve.
Papa Matt, 29, and his wife Sara, 27, met plastic surgeons who told him that Cam would need a series of operations to rebuild his mouth.
On July 25, he underwent a grueling operation to repair his upper lip – and the results are unbelievable.
Adorable photos show the young man radiant largely a few days after the operation at the Dallas Medical City Hospital.
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"It was a big smile, it made the biggest smile possible," said Matt, a Forney filmmaker. "Sara and I cried because we were starting to believe we would never see him smile, the beam was in his eyes and cheeks, he said, 'I'm still here, I'm still the same baby, everything is fine. "ACCORD."
Cam's lip and palate were not included in Sara's sonograms before birth.
But Matt said that since his birth at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, he and Sara, a dental assistant, knew that something was wrong.
"Nobody said anything at first. I went to see Cam and the nurses were all tight against each other, "he says. I had never seen anything like her face. I did not know at all what I was watching. A nurse told me that he had a cleft lip and palate. and that they needed to know how he was going to eat and breathe. "
Cam's cleft lip and palate was not detected in Sara's sonograms.
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After a few days spent in the neonatal intensive care unit, Cam returned home with his parents.
In the weeks that followed, the couple visited a plastic surgeon who explained that Cam would need three operations to rebuild his mouth.
The first operation would reconstruct Cam's upper lip. The second, when he was 18 months old, was going to repair the roof of his mouth.
The final procedure would consist of a bone graft to reconstruct his chewing gum when it is between 4 and 7 years old.
Baby Cam has been equipped with a mouthpiece, called the NAM device, which covers the roof of his mouth to expand the area for the first operation.
"The mouthpiece had small balls that were fitted into Cam's nostrils to extend the skin between the nose and the mouth," he said. "We had to go every week to adjust them, we hated seeing Cam suffer and we wondered if we were doing the right thing.
Barely 3 months old, Cam underwent surgery to repair his upper lip.
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"The doctors sewed her lip where it was split, so her lip was no longer divided into three parts," Matt said. "It was really difficult to deliver it for surgery. When the nurses gave it up, he was screaming. on morphine and his face was swollen, bruised and bloody. It was like we had been given a different baby. "
"He cried all day. We had to feed him with a syringe after the operation, "he said. I hated to know that something we had chosen, the operation, had caused so much pain to our son. "
Cam, photographed with his twin brother, will face two other surgeries in his future.
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But a few days after the operation, as the swelling decreased and the bruises healed, Matt and Sara were rewarded by seeing Cam smiling for the first time on the upper lip.
"Sara changed her diaper and I watched TV," said Matt. "She started screaming," Come here, he's smiling! "I rushed in. I could not believe it In my darkest moments, I thought I would never see him smile with a healed upper lip, but here he radiated me.
Matt wanted to give hope to other parents struggling with a baby with a cleft palate.
"It's terrifying, but the scariest is before talking to the surgeons," he says. Once your doctor and a strong team are in place, it becomes a lot less scary. It does not matter whether they have a cleft palate or not.
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