Dr. Michael A. Epstein

While all surgery has some inherent risk, rhinoplasty surgery has a relatively low complication rate, especially when performed by an experienced rhinoplasty surgeon. More than the true surgical complications there are also risks of the surgical result not turning out or healing exactly how the patient and or the surgeon was desiring. It is notable though, that those undesirable results are almost always repairable. In the end, only you can weigh these risks against how unhappy you are with your nose as it is now.

If you are talking about the resolution of swelling and bruising from a septoplasty, most of the time patients see very little so you can look normal within days to a week. If your septoplasty includes revisions of the external aspects of your nose (ie., hump reduction, correction of asymmetry, improvement in tip shape, etc.), it may take 1-2 weeks for the bruising to resolve and swelling to decrease to the point where you look "normal".

Generally speaking, I am always surprised how little discomfort most of my breast lift patients have after this surgery.

Frankly, you are lucky (and should be careful) that you found a surgeon that told you that they would do a reduction at 16. There is chronologic age (the number of years you have been alive), there is physical age or maturity (often assessed by growth plate closure and secondary physical characteristics), and there is emotional maturity (how will a person be able to deal with the normal and sometimes abnormal recovery and outcomes of a surgical procedure like breast reduction. I typically find that patients are not quite ready for this surgery until they are at least 18 and I would still have them come in with their parents or significant other to help best assess the later.

Rhinoplasty surgery results should last forever. Of course there are times that the shape can change with time both in the relatively short run from cartilage or bone changes that might occur as a result of the actual surgical trauma to those structures and in the long run from the aging process itself. The nasal features can change with age just like other parts of the face. Most often though, a good rhinoplasty should remain form stable for many, many years.

A good brow lift, like a good facelift should essentially be permanent in the sense that a person that has one of those anti-aging procedures will always look younger/better than they would had they not had the procedure. If you are asking how long will it take till you look like you do just before the surgery, the answer is that it could be many years (5-10 or more) depending on the type of brow lift that you have. Open brow lifts tend to last longer than endoscopic brow lifts.

The best thing you can do to ensure a problem free recovery is to follow your surgeon's instructions before and after the surgery. The recovery process can be so varied because not all rhinoplasties are the same and not all people are the same in how their tissues respond to surgical trauma.

The fastest way to recover from any surgery is to make sure that you understand your pre-op and post-op instructions thoroughly and then follow them. For eyelid surgery it is imperative to refrain from taking any potential blood thinning agents before and after your surgery for 2 weeks on either side of your operation unless there are special circumstances. Another key to success that works for my patients is the use of cool compression masks to be used as much as possible in the first few days after surgery.

Before answering the question what is a "mini" facelift it would be best to start off explaining that different surgeons have different definitions of a "full" facelift. Some consider that to mean that the entire neck, midface, and forehead are lifted but many consider the forehead (or brow) lift to be a distinctly separate procedure that may or may not be performed with lifting the midface and neck. Others consider the neck to be a separate procedure. So just like these named procedures the mini facelift, too, can be defined in different ways. I consider a "Mini" facelift to being a short scar that extends from the temple to the middle of the ear where enough skin is elevated to access soft tissue below which is then lifted and supported. The most important info I can give is for you to get a clear definition from the surgeon you are speaking with so you can 'compare apples to apples" and make an informed decision.

Having rhinoplasty surgery during the summer does not increase the risk of infection from excessive exposure to heat because in this day and age there are climate controlled environments to recover in.

Obviously, the best outcome would be for you to get the results that you were looking for in one operation, but yes, while often more challenging, it is rare when a bad result from a previous rhinoplasty cannot be corrected with a second operation.