Plastics
Thursday, July 14th, 2005A plastics resident told me that people pay some $25,000 per face lift, and that one plastic surgeon he knows is able to perform two a day on average. He then said, “do the math.” I tried, but I just can’t count that high. This is just the sort of seduction I have to be careful about as a rising 4th-year.
The cases I’ve seen this week have been dramatic and have varied between elective procedures in self-improvement and must-do restorative work. There’s a clear disdain for violence on the plastics team because of the amount of work involved in repairing facial and orbital bones broken during melees of the poor and destitute. Joe Q. Doughnut will stumble into the ED with a mushed-up face and a story of woe that depicts a face-off between him and 11 perpetrators. He fights them off with his face instead of his fists and suffers some serious facial trauma. After the swelling goes down in a few days, he’s taken to the OR where plates smaller than paperclips are inserted into bones that are shifting like continents. All this is done without cutting the skin over the face–we access the broken bones through the mouth and from below the eye. It’s very precise and clean, but not without the brutal component of wiring the jaw shut, which requires pushing wire between all the teeth and then drawing it all together. It’s a very rough flossing. There’s also drilling involved, followed by the insertion of self-tapping screws only millimeters long. Then these guys are considered fixed.
Elective surgery is clearly a different story. No one needs an increase in breast size from 250 cc implants to 600 cc implants, but this service makes it happen if that’s what the consumer wants. Nose jobs aren’t what you might expect–it involves shaving and breaking bone, and the patients might feel as if they look much worse before they appreciate the work. It’s all so subjective.
I’ll see hand surgery later this morning, so I should go look up the bones of the hand and re-acquaint myself with the anatomy. Gotta learn something. . .