Cleft palate kids
have a friend in
Dr. Rachel Ruotolo
According to international children’s medical charity Operation Smile, every three minutes, a child is born with a cleft lip and palate, a congenital deformity caused by abnormal facial development during gestation. It’s the kind of condition more often found in Third World countries and one of the many medical missions of mercy annually conducted by Garden City-based Long Island Plastic Surgical Group (LIPSG).
Dr. Rachel Ruotolo is one of the group’s 13 partners and craniofacial and pediatric plastic surgery are her specialties. And while the practice has only started doing these missions in a concentrated fashion in the past five years, Dr. Ruotolo has already visited Vietnam and helped out scores of children in need of corrective surgery. It’s this kind of work that found her receiving a citation from Legislator Norma L. Gonsalves for this kind of work during a recent Toys for Tots appearance. But while television commercials make cleft lip and palate out to be a condition only suffered by children in these more impoverished areas of the world, Dr. Ruotolo is quick to point out that she deals with a significant amount of these cases on Long Island.
“Cleft lip and palate surgery is literally the bread and butter of my practice. I do several a week and people are always asking me where my patients come from and I tell them, right here on Long Island. It’s important to focus on the kids here because clefting is just as big of a problem here as it is elsewhere,” she explained. “On a daily basis, I’m taking care of these kids. I feel like I’m doing the work every day. The kids that you see on the side of a bus are three years old and their condition is uncorrected. But it’s just as common here. And that’s why when parents that do have a baby born with a cleft, they feel very alone because they think that it doesn’t happen here. And it absolutely does. And there aren’t as many support groups for these parents as you would think.”
A major reason why most people are unaware of how common cleft lip and palate abnormalities are is because prenatal ultrasound technology oftentimes allows for the diagnosis to be made in the womb. From here, the primary portion of this type of corrective surgery is done within the first year of life, According to Dr. Ruotolo, some children may need multiple surgeries throughout their lives, be it for revisions, bone grafting or other stages of reconstruction. But for the Upper Brookville resident and mom of two, the positive effect she has on these children and her families makes her all the more eager to go overseas and wield her medical mastery. Unable to leave the country due to the recent birth of her four-month-old daughter, Dr. Ruotolo is eager to return Vietnam, where the memories of her inaugural trip are still fresh.
“At the facility over there, we wound up operating on 16 patients in a day where they were all in one room. There are no nurses there. The families take care of them post-operatively. Obviously the facility there was very rudimentary, but the people are so grateful,” she recalled. “I think when you go on these trips, you’re forced to be given adequate perspective of how lucky we are in this country. I think that’s what these trips do for doctors that are going on them. You get back here and think that the things you worry about on a daily basis are nothing compared to what these people have to worry about. It just puts things in perspective and makes you appreciate what we have here.”
