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Boy tongue op surgeon pioneer

Emilene White
28/ 3/2007

A SURGEON from Audenshaw has carried out a pioneering operation to rebuild a toddler's tongue with stomach muscle.

Peter Hodgkinson operated on 15-month-old Daniel Sewel after doctors found a tennis-ball-sized tumour in his mouth.

Chemotherapy shrank the growth but the remainder had to be cut away in a gruelling eight-hour operation at Newcastle's Royal Victoria Infirmary.

Peter, who now lives outside Newcastle with his family, had to break the tot's jaw to get to the tumour.

He removed about three quarters of it and then attached the muscle using microsurgery in a procedure thought to be the first in the world in children.

"It's something I've done before in adults but not in children. It's very unusual to see it in a child," he said.

He added that Daniel's sense of taste is still functional as he will still have tastebuds on some of his tongue and because much of human taste is made up of smell.

The consultant surgeon still regularly sees the little boy, now three, for check-ups.

He said: "It's very hard to tell there is anything the matter with his tongue. He can swallow and talk and eat perfectly normally. He's a very healthy little boy, his mother was delighted."

A former pupil of Aldwyn Primary School and then Audenshaw Boys' School, Peter, now 47, studied medicine at the University of Manchester and gained a PhD in research into cleft palates.

His parents still live on Assheton Avenue.

Mum Dorothy, 75, said: "We're obviously very proud but there are a lot of people out there doing this fantastic work."