Liposuction and Laser Liposuction

Breast surgery should be relatively uneventful. An hour before, you’ll come to our center, where you’ll spend one hour in the holding area with a warmer on your body to make sure they’re comfortable. We’ll then go to the surgical suite. The surgery can take anywhere from one to three hours. You will then spend one hour after the surgery in our recovery suite, and then you can go home. Our patients can typically return to some form of activity within 24 hours. They can start driving as soon as they’re not taking pain medication, which typically is going to be 24 to 48 hours. I’ve had people go back to work as soon as three to four days after their surgeries. Now, full activities, we’re going to restrict for up to three weeks. Full activities include push-ups in the gym, aggressive cardio, your yoga exercises that will let you get into reduced range of motion exercises within the first two weeks.

Breast surgery is the most common operation performed in America. More people have breast surgery than any other type of surgery. At our practice, we do tons of breast surgery related to breast implants, to breast implant with lifts, and lifts alone. We cover the full gamut. We also have a very large population of patients who have had surgery elsewhere that we’re reoperating on to achieve a more aesthetic, balanced result.

The key to achieving good outcomes with breast surgery is, number one, understanding what it is the patient wants. They want to restore their body to a previously lost form from childbirth or weight loss, so we try and enhance an already natural result. Our goal is to make sure the patient understands what they have, and where they want to go. With those criteria, we then select the appropriate operation with the appropriate implant.

On initial consultation for a “mommy makeover” operation, we’re going to take photographs. We’re going to do a physical examination. Then, we’re going to determine what your lifestyle is and what types of surgeries we could suggest to you for improvement. The recovery is going to depend on the extent of the surgery. If it’s a complete abdominoplasty, you’re going to require 7 to 10 days before you’re going to feel like you like us again. By three weeks, you’re going to start thinking that we’re really pretty good at it. Within three months, we’ll be heroes for you. That really is body surgery in a nutshell. After 10 days, you don’t like us, after three months, you love us.

This case represents one of my favorite scenarios. This lady reached a point after having her babies and reached mid-life — if mid-life can be considered 42 years of age —
and her body had gotten larger than she wanted to be. Through lifestyle changes, including activity and choosing her food a little more selectively, she lost a significant amount of weight, nearly 70 pounds. And she came to us to clean up the mess, if you will, by taking the skin away, tightening the muscles and liposuctioning her hips. She can see we’ve created a body she could never have gotten with all the exercise and dieting in the world. So it’s kind of like the carrot and the stick. She changes her lifestyle, she exercises, chooses her food more carefully, she loses the weight, and then the carrot is us sculpting the body that creates a contour she can be proud of.