Shriner's Hospital Visit

We had a wonderful visit with the doctors and staff at the Chicago Shriner's Hospital. The hospital is very comfortable and relaxing. It is made for kids and it shows. All the staff are relaxed and very professional. Kole even opened up and enjoyed himself there also.

We met with each person on our cleft team for evaluations and they are looking forward to working with us and us with them. Kole was really interested in the Cow with high heels and sunglasses on.

We took his favorite stuffed animal with him and he had his doggie sit in the dentist chair and just giggled. He really enjoyed drawing on the chalk boards in the examination rooms while we were waiting for a team member to come in. We never waited longer than 10 minutes in any examination room. The waiting area was very comfortable.

We found out that Kole has several cavities that need to be fixed as soon as possible. Dr. Lin will be taking care of this at his first opening for a day surgery. Their next thing they will work with us on is Speech. As far as they can tell from the breif talking Kole would do, he is not having any problems talking. He is able to make the gutteral letter sounds that require the soft palate to produce so they are very pleased. He can do the K, hard G and DZ sounds. His ears are clear and his hearing appears to be just fine. They still want to test with the head set when he is ready to cooperate with out being scared. His fistual is very small and the team sees no reason to fix that immediately. They are going to wait until he has grown some more and the gumline is worked on before closing the last fistula. They will do the nose and lip revision when he is 16 years old. It is sounding like only 4 surgeries. If he has social issues before age 16 about his nose, they will fix it ahead of time, but it will need more revision when he is done growing. So, they are trying to hold off and do the whole thing with as few surguries done at the proper growth times. Kole will go back every 6 months for them to check his progress in all areas of the cleft team.

All in all it was a great experience.