Cleft Lip / Palate Support Group
Cleft is a congenital deformity caused by a failure in facial development during gestation. It can be treated with surgery shortly after birth with highly successful results. Cleft occurs in somewhere between one in 600 and one in 800 births. Cleft occurs in several severities and is divided in two major categories: cleft lip and cleft palate.
Hey everyone, on behalf of Timothy Armoo from doodlar.com, I would like to invite everyone to check out his site and consider contributing to a group interview about cleft lip and palate. Doodlar supports one cause per month by selling custom t-shirts through the website, and this month they are doing Operation Smile. Tim is also looking to promote a campaign of information on the site; you can see a couple interviews that are already posted.
If you would like to contribute anything on your own, by all means contact his profile on here. However, I thought it might be a good idea to put together a "group interview" where we just ask ourselves a series of questions, followed by answers from as many of us as responded to the question. If you think of any questions of your own, I hope you will post them below. Even if you prefer not to answer them yourself, maybe somebody else would like to.
If you would like to contribute anything on your own, by all means contact his profile on here. However, I thought it might be a good idea to put together a "group interview" where we just ask ourselves a series of questions, followed by answers from as many of us as responded to the question. If you think of any questions of your own, I hope you will post them below. Even if you prefer not to answer them yourself, maybe somebody else would like to.
"How did you get those scars? Did something happen to your face?"
These are scars from surgeries to repair my cleft lip and palate, a condition I was born with. Basically, the two sides of my face in the region of my upper lip and the roof of my mouth didn't grow together in the womb, so the surgeries were done to finish attaching them. The scars came as part of the healing process.
"That sounds kind of painful. What was the treatment like?"
Most of my surgeries were done before I could remember and I was unconscious for them anyway, so I don't have painful memories from most of them. Being a patient was something I sort of grew up with. I learned to be patient and trust the doctors. Later in life I came to understand that they would never be able to restore my face to how it would have looked without cleft, but I've also come to realize more how lucky I was to be able to get surgery in the first place. Things would have been a lot different for me if I was born in a poorer country, and I've learned that even living in a first world country doesn't guarantee you'll get the needed treatment, either. All in all I had about ten or eleven surgeries, a couple more minor dental procedures, and wore braces and retainers for several years, all by the time I was fifteen.
Like many cleft patients, my speech was affected so I took speech therapy in elementary school. Today my voice still sounds a little flat and nasal, but I can speak clearly and even enjoy public speaking.
"Did you get picked on much in school for looking or sounding different?"
Yes, just like everybody who looks or sounds different gets picked on when they're young (and more often than not, when they're older, too.) That doesn't make it okay, but it's true. Actually, my experience with bullies could have been a lot worse than it was. Some of the others kids would stick up for me and I was thought of as a smart, well-behaved, sometimes funny, but definitely kind of weird kid. I really didn't have a lot of self-esteem. Deep down I felt like there was a great big gap between me and everyone else, bu I was usually able to cover it up. It wasn't until I was much older that I started to ask myself about how having a cleft really made me different from anybody else.
I do want to point out that some of the people I have met who were the rudest or most offensive were not children at all. You could say that although they had an adult's body, inside they had an infantile maturity level. But it also shows that people just have different ideas of what maturity means. Many people think that toughness is the ultimate virtue, or at least they present themselves that way. Can we really criticize children for not acting like adults, when the adults don't agree on what mature behavior is? I think there is a lot of moral confusion in our culture that contributes to bullying behaviors.
"Isn't that just the way people are, though? Science says we evolved through natural selection and survival of the fittest. How can you expect people to be basically moral when they evolved through the self-interest of their genes?"
I do believe this is where we came from (because the evidence supports it) but I don't believe it has to define us our behavior. I believe that morality, justice, fairness and love are part of a higher realm which is available us because of the consciousness we have evolved into.
Furthermore, because of our modern ability to destroy ourselves and our habitat, we must reach for that higher realm because if we don't, there will just be nothing else to reach for. As improbable as it may seem, I see the challenge of how to accept a facial difference as related to the challenge of how to survive as a species.
How can we expect to address the issues of hunger, genocide, poverty, war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (and the U.S. national debt) if we can't even look at somebody with a facial difference as our brother or sister? Death and disease are part of the human experience, as much as the potentials for violence, cruelty, greed and ignorance. If we deny these the reality of these things, we'll never change any of it.
When people see someone with a facial difference, I'd like them to see it not as a symbol of despair but of hope. Even in the face of hardship we can persevere, and we always have the ability to choose our we interpret what happens to us and how we respond to it. It can symbolize the interconnection between us. I would have had a much more startling appearance and harder time speaking clearly if not for the surgeries made possible through medical institutions, but this is part of the same social contract that extends to you. If you have an unfortunate, disfiguring or life-endangering accident, the same institutions that helped me will be there to help you. Well -- not always, and not everywhere. This is what Operation Smile is about. Why do it? Because human life is valuable. Nothing else has our capacity for language, for thought, for learning and depth of emotion.No matter how disfigured a person may be, as Carl Sagan pointed out, in a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another human.