After a healthy nine-month pregnancy while living in Spain, Annette and Valdemar Figueiredo felt like the luckiest couple on earth. But the joy they shared turned to anguish in the delivery room when they discovered that their baby girl, Natasha, had a facial deformity -- bilateral cleft lip and palate -- appearing as two wide gaps extending from the roof of her mouth through her lip and nose.

In the midst of their shock and grief, they struggled to sort out their daughter's treatment needs. By the time Natasha was five weeks old, the Figueiredos had scheduled the first of many surgeries -- complex procedures that were expected to span her childhood and adolescence.

A Big Move

Then the Figueiredos received a phone call from a family friend. They had no idea that the conversation would change Natasha's young life. The concerned friend was a 27-year-old man who wanted Natasha to avoid the anguish he had endured, having undergone more than 20 operations to correct his cleft lip and palate.

The Figueiredo's friend begged them to contact Court Cutting, MD, a plastic surgeon at New York University Medical Center, where a new corrective technique had been developed that could dramatically reduce Natasha's need for surgery. Best of all, the new technique promised to provide Natasha with excellent cosmetic results long before starting school, sparing her the teasing and isolation children with facial deformities often bear.

A New Philosophy: Treat Early in Life

"It wasn't enough to turn out good-looking 18-year-olds," says Dr. Cutting. "My goal is to get kids looking good while they're still infants, so they will not have to go through childhood with major facial deformities."

"In the old days, surgeons had to operate in stages," Dr. Cutting recalls. "The first procedure pulled the lip together; another one was for the nose, then another -- often including a bone graft -- would close the palate, and so on. Today we put our efforts into the child's first operation, so we can get a normal looking kid in one procedure.