“Brow Lift Before Botox Wears Off?”

I had an excellent experience. There was some pain involved, but nothing intolerable and I was given plenty of pain medication. Swelling is lasting longer than I expected.

Hi,

I am 45 years old and 11 weeks ago I had a "bad" Botox outcome which caused my left eyebrow to droop. I realize that this was likely caused by a bit of an application error of the part of the Dr., but the fact of the matter is I have also known for some time that I am one of those that "needed" a brow lift.

To make a long story short, I finally decided to take the plunge and have a full "open" brow lift (i.e., with the incision from ear to ear and several inches behind the hairline) along with lower blepharoplasty. The surgery was performed by a carefully chosen doctor, who has 30 plus years experience in such procedures and I am now 18 days post-op. The right side of my face is truly perfection, and I couldn't be happier. The incision(s) even at this early stage are barely noticeable and I am surprised at how easy the whole thing was.

However, the left side is a problem. I have malar edema, bruising in the upper eyelid, and the left brow is far lower than the right. In fact, the entire left eye just seems very closed in and is quite noticeably different from the right.

My Dr. told me that I did not need to wait for the Botox to completely wear off before having surgery, but I am starting to wonder if I should have. I guess I thought that the brow lift would have corrected the brow asymmetry problem immediately, but I do realize now that the left brow muscle is still considerably paralyzed because I am unable to raise that brow.

My Dr. tells me that we will need to wait for the Botox to wear off completely before I see the final results and I have every reason in the world to trust him, but I guess I could use some reassurance here. He told me that he was careful to remove exactly the same amount of skin on each side, but I'm wondering if this left brow will indeed come back up again and if the noticeable asymmetry will correct once the Botox wears off.

I'm sure that my brows were not perfectly symmetrical in the first place, but they were never perceptibly asymmetrical -- so all I am hoping for at this point is for the left to be as similar to the right as it always has been, and I'll be happy.

Is it possible to actually damage muscle that has been treated with Botox during surgery? This is probably a dumb question, but it's the thing that's been running through my mind lately............

I had an excellent experience with my open brow lift and lower blepharoplasty, but am still experiencing some asymmetry issues, which are likely due to a bad Botox outcome 8 weeks prior to surgery. 

There was some pain involved, but nothing intolerable and it was easily managed with OTC Tylenol after the first day.  Swelling is lasting longer than I expected on the left side, which was the side that I had eyebrow droop as a result of the Botox.