Dubai: Twelve-year-old Judith Ratanayake’s mother said yesterday that the doctor was happy with the outcome of the six-hour surgery to correct her daughter’s deformed bones.
“The frame looked scary, but that is what we expected,” said Renuka, the child’s mother.
Judith had undergone a special surgery carried out by Dr Marc Sinclair, orthopaedic surgeon and founder of Little Wings Foundation, the UK-based charity, that bore most of the cost of the procedure.
Judith suffers from dwarfism and the procedure was done to alleviate the constant pain she was in. The procedure, called the Ilizarov Technique, fixes a metal frame to the girl’s leg to straighten the bones.
Gulf News spoke to Renuka a few minutes after she and her husband were allowed to see their child after surgery. “We couldn’t speak to her [as Judith was still under the effects of anaesthesia]. She seemed to be crying in her sleep. That must be due to pain,” she said.
Renuka said there were “no surprises” as the surgeon had earlier walked them through the procedure. She thanked Gulf News for following up on her child’s case. “My husband got our twins [Hilary and Josephine] to see her [Judith] after the surgery,” she said.
Dr Sinclair said Judith would be under observation for a week for pain management and to bring down the swelling. There would be follow-up on manipulating the ‘fixator’ (the frame) and X-rays would be taken to see how the bones grow.
Asked whether Judith would gain some height after this procedure, Dr Sinclair said her bones would grow a bit. “But that was not the issue [in conducting the surgery].” He described Judith as a very mature girl. “She is a person of her own right.”
A part of the surgery’s costs will be borne by Judith’s parents (the procedure costs more than Dh100,000). Little Wings, said Dr Sinclair, helps families that are not able to afford procedures not covered by insurance. “Many of the congenital defects and pre-existing conditions are not covered,” he said.
The charity’s next project is to send a team of doctors to the Turkish-Syrian border where hundreds of thousands of refugees are pouring in, many of them children. Many Palestinian children, Dr Sinclair said, are brought to Dubai by the Foundation for complicated surgeries.
