By Jessica Fitzpatrick | Manager, Marketing & Outreach
Hi, my name is Callum. I’m 13 years old and I was born with an incomplete bi-lateral cleft lip and a complete cleft palate. I didn’t have a lip like most babies and I didn’t have a roof in my mouth.
The cool part was that I could stick my tongue through my nose from the inside. The part that sucked was that I couldn’t suck my soother or drink from a normal bottle. My mom had to use a squeezy bottle and squeeze my milk into my mouth.
I’ve had nine surgeries since I was born. I had my lip reconstructed when I was 4 months old. Then I had my palate fixed when I was a year old. If I didn’t get my palate fixed, I would never be able to suck a straw or blow up a balloon. There were some minor surgeries like a rhinoplasty and ear tubes before I had a bone graft, which took a piece of bone from my hip and put it into my upper gums. That was when I was 8 or 9 years old. But unfortunately, it didn’t take and I had to have that surgery again when I was 11. Now I can bite an apple or eat sour soothers and not have my teeth move around. I used to have teeth in my palate, but I had to have chains attached to them and the dentist tightened the chains all the time to pull them into where my eye teeth needed to be. Now I just have braces.
So doctors can fix all of that. They can make me look like a normal kid to the best of their ability. But I’m one of the lucky ones because my cleft lip is one of the rare ones – bilateral means TWO or BOTH SIDES – so my cleft is more symmetrical than some other kids. But all of the surgeries in the world can’t make you look in the mirror and like what you see. That’s where AboutFace comes in.
When I was 10 years old, my mom asked if I wanted to go away to camp for a few days. Camp Trailblazers is a camp for kids with facial differences. I was scared. I had never been away to overnight camp before. My mom arranged for one of the kids, Amanda, to chat with me online. I learned we had a lot in common and I started to get a little bit excited about going to camp.
At camp there were lots of fun things to do like trampoline, capture the flag, canoeing, geocaching and even horseback riding. I didn’t like horseback riding. I thought that I was going to hurt the horse. You see, I’ve always been bigger than the average kid – and when my mom took me to ride on the ponies when I was little – the man wouldn’t let me ride. He got out his scale and embarrassed me in front of everyone. He said that I was too big and I would break his horse’s back. But Dan, who is one of the counsellor’s at the camp – encouraged me to try it. He supported me and made me feel strong. So when I got home, the first thing that I said was, “Mom, I rode a horse” My mom cried and I really didn’t know why.
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