What holds many people back from getting plastic surgery? It's often the idea of recovery. The thought of stepping away from work or social activities can feel overwhelming, but everyone finds their own solution to the recovery puzzle when the timing and circumstances feel right.
Spending too much time avoiding recovery can mean missing out on a procedure you've wanted for a while. If you have a big event coming up and want to refine your appearance, planning ahead for recovery is key.
Make room in your life to prioritize your aesthetic goals. If it's something you're going to do eventually, why not do it now and enjoy the results longer?
Dr. Bass covers:
- Different types of recovery, from resting at home to stepping back from social activities while you heal
- How recovery time and experiences vary depending on the procedure and your unique journey
- The typical recovery timelines for popular treatments, from surgeries like face lifts and tummy tucks to nonsurgical options like injectables and energy-based treatments
Transcript
Summer Hardy (00:01):
Welcome to Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Class, the podcast where we explore controversies and breaking issues in plastic surgery. I'm your co-host, summer Hardy, a clinical assistant at Bass Plastic Surgery in New York City. I'm excited to be here with Dr. Lawrence Bass, Park Avenue, plastic surgeon, educator, and technology innovator. Today's episode is Recovery Riddle. Okay, Dr. Bass, I have an idea about what this is about, but to be sure, fill me in a bit. What's the riddle with recovery?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (00:32):
We all know treatments and surgeries can have recovery, and we accept this as part of the way things are at least in the abstract. But when it comes time to go ahead with a treatment, many people are reluctant to step out of their day-to-day schedule. We all lead busy lives and it's hard to make the time to get something done, and in a lot of ways we become more reluctant to be pulled out of full activities. After the pandemic, we spent so many months, years locked up at home, not going into the office, not socializing, not traveling. And so now that we're back, we have that fear of missing out. We don't want to have to be laid up again and spend a few days or a week or whatever the recovery interval will be. A lot of people during the pandemic actually took advantage of the fact that a lot of those activities stopped.
(01:37):
Some of my patients who had business travel for the last 20 years and never had a good time, finally had no business travel and they were at home and able to do it or they were working remotely and it was easier to put in or remote interval recovering at home than before the pandemic. So some people squeeze things in during the pandemic. That's part of it. Part of it is how to explore recovery time, but basically if you're avoiding avoiding avoiding recovery time, you end up with pent up desires. And then often there's precipitous decision making that I'm going to go ahead with something or you have to go ahead with something because you have a wedding coming up, a big family event, something where you have to refine your appearance and you end up doing it when you don't have enough time. When if you planned a little better, it would've fit in much better with your schedule. So I'm kind of beating the drum here for planning for biting the bullet and getting the benefit, and that's what this episode is about, how to figure that out.
Summer Hardy (02:53):
That makes sense. So how does all of this factor into patient decision making?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (02:58):
So the number one factor that I see in my patients in deciding to go ahead with a surgery or even a treatment, it's not surgery, is the recovery time. That's the number one thing that makes patients decide whether or not they're going to do something. They're willing to have this or that surgery, and then when it's time to actually put a number on it, basically pick a date when you can do it. That's yet another stumbling block when the idea of recovery time arrests people, they can't commit to a date, okay, I'm going to take a week off starting the 5th of November or whatever. They know they want to do it, but they're not ready to step out of daily routine and make that commitment.
Summer Hardy (03:57):
Got it. I know it's intuitive to an extent, but what do you mean by recovery? Can you give me a working definition?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (04:05):
So this is actually really important and that's a great question. Traditional recovery time means a limit in activity that could be mild, like you can't go to the gym or it could be almost total like you have to stay at home lying in bed. And so that's one kind of recovery time where you're really sidelined from work, socializing, running errands because you need to rest at home to allow a surgery to heal safely. That's one kind of recovery time. There's the recovery time where you're off sports spending, lifting heavy exertion, that's another kind of recovery time. That interval's going to be different from your lying around at home time. And then there's something we sometimes call social recovery time. This is a period of time when you feel well, you're able to do everything physically, both in terms of how you feel and in terms of it being medically safe, but something is showing in your appearance that makes you not want to be seen by family, friends, coworkers, the public. So social recovery time, and this is more associated with treatments than with surgery. But even with surgery, there's a period of time when there's bruising, swelling when you may feel perfectly fine, you could work on the telephone, do paperwork at home, but you don't really want people to see you yet because they would be able to see that you are recovering from something.
Summer Hardy (05:46):
Okay. Now that we know the definitions, we need to talk about amount, what do you tell patients about recovery, Dr. Bass?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (05:53):
Usually patients hear are a simple bottom line number. Recovery is two weeks, but as we just pointed out, first of all, what kind of recovery? There's more than one. And if you have a surgery, there's going to be some lying around recovery time, and then there's going to be some out of the gym recovery time, and there may be a third number for social recovery time. But separate from that, those numbers represent an average. And if you want to look deeper at each of those kinds of recovery, you have to think of an average number. That's what if we took a hundred people, lined them up, gave them a certain treatment and measured how much time it took till they could go back to work or till they could socialize. That would be the average number. But there's also a range in that group of a hundred people.
(06:48):
Most of the people are going to be clustered around that average number cluster or minus a day or two. But a few people are going to be really lucky. They thought they were going to have two weeks off, but at a week they look good and they feel well and they're ready to be back out and around. And there'll be some people who are unlucky, they bled a little more, they really got knocked out by the stress of the surgery more than most people do or some reason we can't put our finger on. But it's just taking them longer to get back to normal. And so no one can promise you a number. They can tell you what the average number is, what the average number is in their experience, in their practice, but they also are going to hopefully give you an idea of what the range is like, and they may be able to tell you a little bit about if you have a risk factor that might modulate your risk up a little bit. If you know you're a bruiser, you brush by a desk and you get a big purple bruise on your thigh for two or three weeks, you're probably going to have a little bit longer recovery time than average if you have a mild clotting disorder or some other medical condition that can just increase for your recovery time a little bit, your healing time.
Summer Hardy (08:13):
That's really interesting. I didn't realize how in depth recovery can be. Based on these numbers, how should patients plan?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (08:20):
So this is the practical dimension because the idea behind doing this episode was to help people think a little bit about how they should think and make decisions with their aesthetic plan. So I suggest the first thing is to get a consultation or sometimes two or three if you want a few opinions, find out what procedure you need, don't assume you know what procedure you need, and then find out from the surgeon what their projection is of recovery time because a lot of people think they know, but that may not be what it is currently in 2024. So you try to work on recovery estimates that the expert is telling you work in their practice, and the name of the game for us in modern aesthetic plastic surgery is telling patients as close to hitting the nail on the head as we possibly can what recovery is like, I can't tell someone, well, it could be up to three months.
(09:29):
I mean, no one can take three months off in modern life. That just doesn't work the way it worked decades ago in plastic surgery. We've got to be able to let you plan very precisely. We can never promise. There can always be variation, but we've got, it's our job to get as close as we can so that you don't have some disruption so that you can plan. I also recommend that you don't put it off. You plan a time that will give you a window of activity around major work obligations, big trips, big family obligations, but you have to put some priority around getting the procedure done. And it depends very much on how much recovery is involved. For many, many things, it's just a long weekend, and so you wait for the time of year when there are some three day weekends or when it's easy to take a day off of work, something like that.
(10:26):
It's never a good time, but it's fun to do these things. It's fun to get the change, and so it's worth the commitment of time. Sometimes it's a vacation. A lot of my patients really want to save those for fun. They want to travel, they want to go out and do sports, and being laid up with the surgery is not going to let them do that. But sometimes you get that years long result of doing a surgery and that aesthetic change that you've really been bothered and bothered for years by an aesthetic feature, you finally get that addressed. That's really worth putting some priority on. A lot of patients will come in the office and do the consultation they can because for a reason, because some future was bothering them enough to make a visit to the doctor's office. If it's bothering you enough to do that, it's probably worth the bother of doing the procedure if there's a reliable way of improving the feature. So it's worth leaving enough time to do those things, and that's the final point. He didn't need to leave enough time to heal properly so you get a great result. And trying to short circuit things, going back to activities prematurely, is asking for a complication or a healing delay, something that we're really, really trying to avoid in aesthetic plastic surgery. And that is avoidable if you play by the rules, but all of those rules exist for a good reason.
Summer Hardy (12:04):
All of that makes a lot of sense. Now, can you give me some specific examples for surgical procedures?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (12:10):
Well, they can. First of all, each surgeon's going to be a little bit different based on his or her technique and his or her management program for patients afterwards. But typically for most facelifts or neck lifts period, somewhere between one and two weeks is enough. I usually tell patients a week to a week and a half is you're out of the public eye recovery time and two weeks if you're really trying to keep it a state secret. For eyes, it's usually five to seven days. For liposuction, for most liposuction areas and for an average liposuction volume, say two to three liters, it might be a few days off of the office like a long weekend. If you're doing a very large volume liposuction, that's a different story. And for very small areas, the recovery is very short, typically minimum. Adominoplasty is the big one. Adominoplasty is somewhere between one and two weeks off of work. Breast augmentation, typically a week off of work, breast lifts, breast reductions between one and two weeks. Typically, this is going to be modulated. If you're doing multiple procedures at the same time, you're going to start inching up on recovery. And if you're just doing a single treatment, most of the time can hit these numbers.
Summer Hardy (13:44):
And what about nonsurgical treatments?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (13:47):
So these numbers are all over the map, depending on what the treatment is, where injectables, Botox, fillers, there's usually no recovery, but there's often a little drop of swelling or shape irregularity early on, settles for a few days. You are more aware of it than other people are, but there's always a bruising risk. Anytime you break the skin with a needle, you can get a bruise and if you get a bruise that, it's not going to keep you out of the gym, it's not going to keep you from traveling, but it's social downtime. A little faint bruise might hide with little makeup, but for a very dense purple bruise, takes a couple of weeks to go away and does not conceal very easily with makeup. So that's the injectable story. Energy treatments, again, are all over the map and there's a lot of variation, both based on what the treatment is and on how skin reacts.
(14:52):
Some people have very sensitive skin, they get red, they stay very red or very swollen longer, and other people have very tough resilience skin that doesn't react very much when they get even fairly aggressive treatment. So there are treatments like Ultherapy and sSofwave that are skin tighteners or skin lifters and they have no social downtime. You look and feel normal right after the treatment. There are things like IPL, intense pulse light treatments or broadband light treatments, microneedling treatments where you can have almost no recovery. The skin might look a little kicked up for a day or two, but you can do most of your social and work activities or you could get a lot of redness, a lot of swelling, a lot of irregularity on the surface with a microneedling treatment that may take several days to settle down. That's going to depend on the energy device. It's going to depend on your skin. It's going to depend on how aggressively the treatment needs to be done, how severe your features are that you're treating. And actual resurfacing treatments that leave a raw skin surface obviously have healing time, and that's both social recovery and sometimes some staying at home recovery time. But those things usually won't keep you out of the gym or exertion or affect how well you feel. They just affect how you look.
Summer Hardy (16:26):
Okay, so in summary, what would you tell patients about recovery time and surgery or procedures?
Dr. Lawrence Bass (16:33):
So nowadays, procedures are faster, easier, and more reliable. That's the good news, and that means that recovery time is telescope down, but there still is some recovery time required. So before you do something, understand what exactly to expect so you can plan an appropriate amount of time and also build a small buffer in because there is some variation. Don't say, "well, I assume this is going to go the same as the best person who ever had this treatment in the history of humanity," because you might be the second person, but not likely. You're probably going to be somewhere around that average. But give plus or minus a day just in case. Get a consultation from an experienced aesthetic plastic surgeon to find out what the number is. Don't assume you know, and doctor internet doesn't always give you the right answer, and it may not apply to the particular technique or approach that the surgeon you are working with uses overall.
(17:46):
What I'd like to say to patients is build enough time in your life to pursue your priority aesthetic items. If you're going to do something sooner or later, you may as well do it now and enjoy it longer. If you really think you're going to live to be 90 or 100 and never do X, Y, Z procedure, fine. Put it off. Put it off. If you change your mind, you can do it. But if you're going to do it sooner or later and you have a moderate amount of that change or that undesired attribute that the procedure's going to fix, if you do it sooner, you're going to get to enjoy it that much longer. That's true with anti-aging or rejuvenation aesthetic surgeries. And it's especially true with things that change your appearance, rhinoplasty, facial implants, other face shaping or body shaping things where you're going to keep that change for years, years, years rather than suffering with a future you're not happy with.
(18:54):
Bite the bullet, commit the recovery time and get what you want. As I said, plan enough time to heal well so you get a great result. Don't break the rules. The rules are designed to prevent you repeating someone else's problem. We learned a lesson, a rule was made, how to avoid that. They're not arbitrary. They're not just to make things inconvenient. You modulate your recovery a little bit based on where your privacy thermostat is set. Some people don't want anyone to know except the one or two immediate family members and other people are much more public about it. Practicing in the Northeastern United States where people tend to keep it a secret except from one or two close friends and family members, and if you live in other parts of the country, you tell everyone and show everyone. But if you are in a place where you're not telling, you need to plan a drop more time than if you're in a place where you're comfortable telling and showing everyone, I will tell you, it's hard to keep it a secret from immediate family members who you live with, but some people try and succeed in doing that.
(20:08):
But you don't want to get caught and outed if you don't have to. So sometimes it's better to just stay ahead of time. So there's never a good time to do a plastic surgery because we lead busy lives. We have a lot of fun, interesting, and important things to do. It's like having children. There's never a good time, but you want to be sure to get it done or you'll really miss out on something worthwhile. So everyone at the end of the day has their own solution to the recovery riddle, the right time and the right place. It's a very worthwhile riddle for everyone to solve for themselves, and I wish the listeners good luck in solving this recovery riddle.
Summer Hardy (20:54):
Thank you Dr. Bass for giving me a better understanding of the ins and outs of recovery time and the reasons and motivations for working aesthetic treatments into my busy New York schedule. Thank you for listening to the Park Avenue Plastic Surgery Class podcast. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, write a review and share the show with your friends. Be sure to join us next time to avoid missing all the great content that is coming your way. If you want to contact us with comments or questions, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at [email protected] or DM us on Instagram @drbassnyc.
