I get asked this question a lot.
“Am I done healing?”
The short answer? It takes one year to heal.
This is not that you won’t be back to work and riding the Peleton and going on vacation sooner. This is not your breast reduction didn’t make you much smaller and lifted, or your liposuction didn’t drop you two pant sizes. This is about your surgery result.
The longer answer for when healing is done is that everyone is different. And when you ask if you are “done” it depends what you are talking about. Are you talking about your scar? Soreness? Swelling? Bruising? Sensation?
After surgery there are immense changes in the first few weeks. I tell people that every day is a like a dog year right after surgery. So you will see huge changes from day one after surgery to day four after surgery. As you get farther out, the rate of change starts to slow down. But you are actively changing over time until you are months and months out.
After being a surgeon for 25 years, when I look at things I can project in my head where you are going to end up. I get that you can’t see it, and sometimes when I say “You look great!” my patient looks at me in confusion, thinking are you seeing what I am seeing? There are predictable changes when you heal. You have to give your body time to go through the process.
Especially in the first six weeks after surgery, you need to go zen. This means, DO NOT LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR EVERY 5 MINUTES. & HEALING IS NOT SYMMETRIC. One side may be more swollen. One side may hurt more. Your nipple may be higher on one side. You may have a weird pucker, or the scar looks bumpy. We don’t know what is real until everything settles. I call this time the rollercoaster, and I do not ride the rollercoaster. I look for objective real issues. Do you have a bleed? an infection? is there a blood supply issue? I have pattern recognition after doing thousands of procedures. Know I am blunt- if I see something I don’t like, I will tell you. So if I am not worried, you should not worry. Please read above again. Healing is not symmetric. We need for the dust to settle to see what is real.
I take photos of patients at around 6 weeks and around 3 months. The reason is a significant amount of settling has occurred by 6 weeks, so we have a pretty good idea of where you are heading. Call it 80% settled. By three months you are even more settled. Call it 95% settled. There are always variations to this. If you had more bruising, you were more active while you were healing so you stayed swollen longer, you had any kind of healing issue (infection, diabetes, etc), or you have poor nutrition, the timeframe may be shifted longer. We want all the skin to stretch, all the scars to fade, all the little bumpy lumpy areas to have time to soften and flatten.
I won’t talk about any revisions (which thankfully are rare) of anything until all the dust has settled. For that, we wait one year.