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I Am a Truck Driver & I Want to Know How Long Before I Can Go out After Facelift? The Truck
Really Pounds the Pavement.
I am wondering if the avoidance of exercise is due to the jarring of the face or rise
of the blood pressure.
Thank you for your question!
You're asking about how long you need to take your time off after a facelift I should say
and you anticipate going back to work and the kind of work that you do being a truck
driver is clearly a very physical type of work and there's a lot of pounding from the
movement afterwards. So it's very understandable that you're asking a question about this.
When you go and ask several doctors about the question you're going to get a range.
And it depends very much on the individual's style and the way they do their procedure
and the protocol they're most comfortable with as far as their experience with face
lifting surgery. So I'll share with you our approach in my practice.
I've been practicing oculofacial plastic surgery for about 20 years and face lifting surgery
is one of the things that we do most frequently. So what I decided early in my career was to
reduce the recovery period of face lifting surgery. When I was in training in the early
90s, face lifting involved general anesthesia and the use of multiple drains and these are
tubes placed under the skin to help get rid of any fluid and the dressings were very large.
So over the course of time, what I ultimately developed was my own quick recovery but a
full face and necklift procedure. And essentially what I did was, I figured out a way to do
the full procedure, not a shortcut, it's not short scar or limited procedure. Not one of
the commercial lifts that people are hearing about on television but it's actually a full
face and neck lift procedure. And I do it under local anesthesia with LITE IV sedation.
In fact we trademarked a name, LITE anesthesia. It's like getting something into your intravenous
or IV that is different from getting general anesthesia. General anesthesia is a circumstance
where you get a tube in your throat and your body is paralyzed so that your surgery is
done where you are completely relaxed where you need a tube to breathe for you.
When I do the surgery, it's under local anesthesia with LITE anesthesia. I feel that I am able
to do the fine tuning of the procedure because there are not tubes and other things that
are impairing me from positioning the person's face while I'm doing the work.
Now understanding face and neck lift requires something called undermining or lifting the
skin away from the underlying tissue. That underlying tissue is referred to as the SMAS
or Superficial Musculoaponeurotic System. This is actually the foundation. It's kind
of the connection between the deeper muscles that connect to the skin so that when your
face moves, your muscles moves, the skin moves with it. So one of the age-related changes
that people experience that are described in my book, "The Fine Art of Looking Younger",
is that in addition to volume loss, you have loosening of this tissue, the SMAS, as well
as the stretching and sagging of the skin.
So imagine, in order to properly lift the face and neck, routinely for me, I make an
opening under the chin to get to the muscle called the platysma muscle and I tighten that
muscle. Ad tightening this muscle, these two bands that people see, is actually we reunite
that muscle which is split. In addition, we lift the skin and do an incision at the temple
behind the ear and around, hidden very strategically. But you can imagine, to lift all this tissue,
you have to lift a lot skin and you have to move and do a lot of work. So typically, that
means that you have to take it really easy for a certain period of time.
Now, typically, our patients get back to work in a week to 10 days. Now that depends because
there's a spectrum. The spectrum of level of facelifts that we need to do. If someone
needs a limited amount of undermining, then you get a limited amount. There are different
names for facelifts that get throw around unfortunately I think is deceptive. You know,
some doctors claim that they only do deep plane face lifting. Well, you're not going
to do the same procedure in everyone. From my perspective, I customize the procedure
to what the patient needs and also you make a lot of these decisions as you do the procedure
and you can see the anatomy. So anything from SMAS flaps, high SMAS, there's a lot of names
for different facelifts and of course, there are many of their trade names.
So essentially, as a general rule of thumb, a proper lift that address all the key components
in order to get the best result and for the long term, the most long lasting. You're looking
at procedures that take a minimum of 2 to 3 hours. And anticipate that you would need
to take it easy for at least 2 weeks and probably, if you were to come to me, I would advise
that you don't plan to go back to work until 3 weeks even until a month after your procedure
because of the type of work that you do.
Now I've operated on a lot of people who are in a more sedentary type of jobs or indoor
kind of jobs such as physicians, lawyers and I'm able to get them back to work in about
a week, 10 days the latest. And they still can have swelling. A very important thing
to anticipate is that, 10 people can have the same procedure and 10 people can have
different levels of swelling even if the surgeon does the same procedure in the same way. And
that's just the individual variation of the human body. So going back to work and not
have any swelling can take a while longer because swelling can fluctuate for 6 months
and even up to a year. But it's not significant swelling, it's usually a couple of weeks.
And in our practice, we noticed that swelling goes down to the point that most people are
able to go back to work. Again, just as a rule of thumb, in my practice, it would be
about 3 weeks to a month.
Now, if you have the desire to have a limited procedure, then you have to be sure to have
a less than an extensive, a more full on procedure. So this is where consultations with different
doctors is very important. So meet with several different cosmetic surgeons, learn their specific
styles and ways they do their procedures and figure out what's most comfortable for you.
Understanding that quick recovery is very important for you and that minimal trauma
and minimal swelling is also very important for you to be able to get back to work and
not worry that the work you're doing is undoing the results of your surgery. So I think that
this is a good starting point for you and I wish you the best of luck, I hope this was
helpful and thank you for your question!