Hope has sprung to life for a 24-year-old man with a rare birth defect after the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Oral and Dental Hospital heard his desperate plea for medical attention following Sunday World’s article last month highlighting his cry for help.
Michael Mahlangu – who has the Pierre Robin sequence, a condition characterised by an underdeveloped jaw, a displacement of the tongue and upper airway obstruction – has been waiting since 2019 for a surgical operation to mend complications resulting from another operation conducted in 2017 by the UP Oral and Dental Hospital. He has been a patient of the facility since 1998 as a new-born.
Mahlangu has constant pain, suffers from headaches and puss oozes out of his right cheek and has even dropped out of his electrical engineering studies.
Sunday World published the article “Engineering student’s long wait for operation stymies his career dreams” on April 9, in which Mahlangu said each time he went to the hospital he would be admitted for a few days and given antibiotics.
A few days after the publication of the article, the hospital called him to give him an appointment date for May 17. On the same week, the hospital’s complaints manager called him asking him to write a formal complaint to the hospital. He has also been asked to meet the hospital’s complaints manager tomorrow [Monday], prior to his doctor’s appointment on Wednesday.
Mahlangu said he had had multiple operations since he was an infant, but the two that he remembered vividly were in 2012 and 2018 because he was a little older. He said the operation in 2012 was not a success. The 2017 operation was to reconstruct his jaws. He said two joints were inserted on both cheeks.
He said he was encouraged after the operation when he could breathe on his own without the assistance of the tracheotomy. He said his speech also improved.
“But I developed other challenges after the operation. I had puss coming out on both sides of my cheeks,” he said.
In 2018, Mahlangu had another operation to remove the joint on his left cheek. “The oozing stopped on the left side. This side does not give me problems. At the hospital they said I would undergo another operation to remove the joint on the right.”
Prof Mzubanzi Mabongo, the head of department for the maxillofacial and oral surgery, confirms that Mahlangu has been a patient since 1998.
“He was first assessed from a neonatal unit in July 1998 for the challenges he was born with. A number of operations were done to correct his congenital anomalies. The major complication is recurrent infections.”
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