People always ask me about the recovery time, which I think is really important to discuss.

The saying that my mentor taught me, who is an amazing surgeon, said that there’s no amount of ice that will ever cover the gentle hand of a surgeon or lack of a gentle hand of a surgeon.

Full Audio Transcript:

People always ask me about the recovery time, which I think is really important to discuss.

The saying that my mentor taught me, who is an amazing surgeon, said that there’s no amount of ice that will ever cover the gentle hand of a surgeon or lack of a gentle hand of a surgeon.

And so, his point is that there was a guy during my fellowship, another attending, that would take 12-14 hours to do a surgery, take forever to do it, didn’t know what he’s doing, and the patients look like they got beat up. It was an incredibly long recovery time and it’s such a different recovery and experience for my patients.

Now, clearly, there are some patients that just bruise more, they have more swelling. I can never give you a 100% prediction, but you can’t ice away a rough surgeon’s hands or a surgeon’s hands
that take too long.

I’m very efficient during surgery, too, so I’m never in a hurry. But what I’m doing is, for example, during a multi-step procedure, like a Rhinoplasty or Facelift, I will be calling out well in advance each suture I need, whether I’m in my surgery center or, for example, on Tuesday, I was operating in the hospital because the patient had some comorbidities that made it safer for me to do it there.

But no matter if I’m working with someone I haven’t worked with or my regular scrub people that have been working with for years, I’m always thinking, what are my next four steps ahead? And I always train my staff to think four steps ahead and that way we’re not having any downtime, waiting for a suture to come or even be opened.

If I think I’m going to need a suture in a minute or two, I’m going to say, open the suture, get it ready, loaded for me and so right when I need it, it’s there.

So, efficiency is so important, a gentle hand, something that doesn’t take forever to do the procedure, as well as an efficient mindset of thinking, these are the next ten steps I’m doing. I’ll need this going, and having staff to support you, all of those things are so important.

So, really, no amount of ice can cover a lack of a gentle hand for a surgeon, and I think that’s just an important thing.

A lot of patients come to me and they’re so concerned because their friend went through two months facelift recovery or they went through weeks of looking crazy after an eyelid procedure.

I just saw a gentleman yesterday who did a hair transplant to correct his brow lift scars that were off and I consulted him on an eyelid procedure.

I said, “Oh, you had your eyelids done?”
He says, “yeah, two months ago.”
He’s still recovering, his eyelids look weird because they did an incision and so this is the thing that scares other patients, is the nature of the recovery period.

And again, yes, once or twice a year I have someone that bruises more than I thought. Usually, it’s due to revision nose or revision face lift that they’ve had aggressive previous work done. But in general, my patients go through much shorter recovery, much less discomfort than anywhere else.