Done Letting my Nose Control my Confidence! - Bellevue, WA

Just a few things I thought about that may help anyone going through this procedure. You get a lot of info/advice thrown at you so here are some things that I would have found most helpful:

1) Buy a cool mist humidifier. Seriously. Just do it. I decided I wouldn't need it and after 1 day post-op I was desperate to find one!! Lol. Your throat & sinuses will be SO dry especially while you sleep. I got the Crane Drop shaped one they sell for $50 at Bed Bath & Beyond and it was amazing.

2) Buy a U-shaped pillow because laying elevated with your head straight is really hard after the first night or two!

3) You will wake up one morning throughout the healing process with your nose looking uneven or weird and it will scare you. This WILL pass. Swelling & healing with this procedure is so strange. One day I accidentally fell asleep with my head tilted to one side and when I woke up my nostrils looked blatantly uneven. I panicked, but this corrected itself throughout a day or two. I had read about this happening but it still freaks you out when you see it on your own face! Haha. Don't spend too much time stressing about it.

4) Take some really bad before pictures. Naturally, many of us who don't like our nose avoid photos that draw attention to it. But in the days prior, do just that. Take those "bad angle" pictures. You know, the ones that you would normally delete as quickly as possible. The first week or two of healing can be a rollercoaster for your self esteem, so when you get down about how it looks during the healing process just keep looking at those before pictures and remind yourself why you did this. Remind yourself that that nose is gone now and it's only going to get better from here!

I have ALWAYS felt self-conscious about my nose. No matter how many people told me "it wasn't that bad, I didn't need surgery", at the end of the day what matters is what you see when YOU look in the mirror, right? Well all I saw was my funny nose. I finally decided I had spent enough of my life dodging pictures, trying to angle my head certain ways when talking to people, I had even developed a subconscious habit of putting my hand up to cover my nose when I smiled big or laughed hard. I was done being "the pretty girl with the weird nose". Yes it was an extremely scary process and I went through over a year of extensive research on the procedure, as well as consulting top surgeons in my state as well as other parts of the country. But I honestly needed to do this for me. So far I am a little over 2 weeks post op and while I am very swollen as expected, I am already happy that I had the procedure and feeling better about many aspects of my nose than I did before. I prefer not to post pictures for privacy, but am willing to share through private message if you are considering the procedure and feel pictures would help. I found that reading the posts on this site and talking to others who had been through the same process really helped it seem a little less scary!