COTW: Ranula

"Wow, have we got an interesting case for you!" It is not every day that a resident will greet me this way (but maybe most days). Being a referral hospital for close to 1 million people, we tend to get quite a few interesting patients. This patient came to us at the age of 2 days. Her mother was concerned about her large tongue. Rightly so.



Having never encountered something like this before, I scoured the ENT textbooks that we have here and then e-mailed pictures to an ENT surgeon in the States. He gave me a detailed description of how to remove this ranula and soon thereafter, a few residents and I removed it with great care. Not surprisingly, the baby's mouth stayed in an open position for a week or so, since her jaw had been fixed in that position for most of her in-utero life. A few weeks later, however, she looked great when we saw her in clinic.