MISSOULA — With her first birthday now just a month away, Sloan McGillis is smiling and happy to be back home in Missoula following a major surgical procedure.
Sloan and her family started 2016 with a trip to New York City, where the 11-month-old girl underwent surgery to remove the vast majority of a benign vascular tumor called a hemangioma that had covered her left cheek since birth.
After seeing different specialists around the country for the condition, Sloan’s parents Joe and Jenny began to work with Dr. Milton Waner, one of the world’s foremost experts in vascular anomalies. He was also the one who performed the procedure at Lenox Hill Hospital on Jan. 6.
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The surgery involved making incisions below Sloan’s eye and along the side of her nose and mouth to open her cheek up, but Jenny said the doctor was able to remove around 90 percent of the growth.
In a followup appointment a week later, Dr. Waner used a laser treatment to burn some of the blood vessels below the skin on the side of Sloan’s face, which will help her normal skin color come back. Jenny said they can already see a marked improvement, and medical staff told them the color should continue to get better in the coming weeks as the remaining swelling from the surgery goes down.
The family doesn’t yet know what follow-up procedures Sloan might need, but the most likely will be fixing her lip where extra skin bunched up during the surgery. When she gets older, she could also have another to help make the scar along her nose and mouth less noticeable.
“Everything now will be mostly cosmetic,” Jenny said.
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