Sheer determination and perseverance will certainly turn the adversaries in one’s favour. This is perhaps turning out to be true for the 10-year-old Keonjhar boy Premranjan Moharana and 12-year-old Bhubaneswar girl Subhashree Swain.
Born with double deformity of cleft lip and cleft palate, Premranjan is now not only speaking fluently after two successful surgical corrections, but is also turning out to be an amazing singer with an envious range of voice.
A first year student of Sangeet Visarad, Premranjan is now waiting for the results of the AIR audition and the Indian Idol audition for the current season.
A child celebrity having performed in over a 100 stage shows, Premranjan is now an acclaimed performer of local music TV channels.
So is the 12-year-old Subhashree Swain of Bhubaneswar. After coming under the scalpel when she was only a three-month-old baby to correct her cleft lip, Subhashree underwent the rigorous cleft palate surgery when she was nine months. Despite her misaligned jaws and buck tooth, she too is now the darling of music channels.
Both these singing sensations with their renditions recently enthralled a crowd of over hundred children, who have undergone the paediatric plastic surgery to correct their congenital abnormalities at the SBM Plastic Surgery Hospital Pvt. Ltd. here at Balikuda under the supervision of plastic surgeon Bibhuti Bhusan Naik.
An accomplished plastic surgeon and a trendsetter in micro-vascular surgeries in Odisha, 48-year-old Dr. Naik claims to have performed over 5,000 cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries till date. “Proper palatal repair at appropriate time and correct post-operative management will rectify all speech problems and the patients will definitely chase their dreams to even become singers,” Dr. Naik asserted.
Cleft lip surgery at the age of three months and cleft palate surgery at the age nine months are said to be the appropriate time, Dr. Naik says adding that most parents fail to identify the palate deformity of their children at this age leading to major complications as they grow up. “With support from “Smile Train” programme, our hospital has already performed nearly 350 lip and palate surgical corrections free of cost in the past one year by not only painting smile on these children but restoring smiles on the faces of their parents,” Dr. Naik said.
