Question: I had otoplasty three days ago. Last night when I was sleeping I rolled over on my side and slept on my ear. I’m so scared I may have ruined my results! Should I be worried?

Answer: As long as your ear looks okay and does not have a significant amount of additional swelling today, I would not worry too much about the effect of sleeping on it as it should not have any long-term consequences.

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Question: I had a mini facelift 3 weeks ago. I’ve been experiencing a lot of pain which I didn’t expect with it being a mini procedure. It’s been getting better, but still uncomfortable. Is this normal?

Answer: I think everyone responds differently to mini facelifts and certainly everybody has a different experience from a discomfort level, so I would have to say that what you are experiencing would be considered normal though I would also say that the far majority of patients do not feel that the procedure is significantly uncomfortable; nonetheless, you have been having some discomfort and I would have expected this would have gone away by three weeks but as long as everything is healing as expected, the discomfort will eventually completely subside and you should still get an excellent result from your procedure.  If you were my patient, I certainly would have recommended that you see me just so we could discuss this and I could evaluate you and make sure that everything is healing as expected and that there is nothing more that we can do to help things move along.

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Question: I’ve heard a lot of doctors say that the recovery following a facelift is about 5 to 10 days. My friend had a facelift and even after 2 weeks she really didn’t feel that comfortable going out in public. Was her case unusual or is that common?

Answer: I would say it really depends on what kind of facelift technique is performed as to how long the recovery is since for minimal incision facelifts many times patients can go back to work the next day as long as they are okay covering up the area where the incisions were with their hair; otherwise, more extensive facelifts, such as an extended SMAS deep plane facelift with platysmaplasty, may take about a week to heal and it may be up to two weeks before patients are really comfortable going out in social circumstances.  There are occasional patients that still have some swelling significant enough that they do not want to go out even at two weeks but certainly by three weeks they all look very good and in the far majority of cases even by one to two weeks they look good enough to go out and perform normal day to day activities.  Obviously, this is also dependent on not only the patient’s healing and the procedure type but also the surgical skills of the provider as well as some of the perioperative care, such as keeping the head of the bed raised, intraoperative steroids, and even herbal supplements.  Over the past 10-plus years, I have made several modifications to our instructions in the time period around the operation so that we have truly been able to minimize our patient’s downtime significantly.

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Question: I had a forehead lift 10 months ago and I still have numbness. What’s the best way to address this?

Answer: It is rather unusual for someone to have numbness 10 months out from a forehead lift, but it is certainly not unheard of.  Usually within about one year, this numbness does completely disappear, so I would continue to recommend patience as more than likely over the next few months sensation will return to normal.  I would have assumed that you have discussed this with your surgeon and if there were any unexpected issues during this surgical procedure, you would have been notified.  With that being said, as long as there was no actual nerve injury during the surgery, full sensation to your scalp should eventually return.

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Question: How long is the cast in place after rhinoplasty?

Answer: I typically leave a splint over the nose for seven days after a rhinoplasty at which point it is removed along with any external sutures if those were placed during the procedure.  Most rhinoplasties that I perform are endonasal, which means that all incisions are on the inside of the nose and, therefore, no sutures would require removal in that case, but the splint is nonetheless placed to essentially push the soft tissue of the nose back down on the underlying bone and cartilage and this helps to improve healing and overall make the nose look better quicker.

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