Hi all! I had a face lift done by the two doctors at the MACS lift clinic in Belgium with Dr Van den Berge and Dr Vermeulen. I absolutely love the way it's gone! AMAZING! The clinic was lovely and the doctors really kind. I met them for a consult in London first and took the train to Brussels. The op was over in a few hours and not painful. The staff were excellent, really friendly and attentive. Really good - Recommend!
Hi girls!! I'm six months after my facelift with Dr Van Den Berge and Dr Vermeulen. I got an extended MACS lift which includes upper. lower bleph, brows, the MACS lift itself and the neck. Only posting photos now!! :) Oh yeah, I chose them cos' thats where the MACS lift was invented. Cost 10000 euros which is like 13000 dollars. Great, great doc and clinic but I'm all wrote out now so more later, promise!!!! :D Updated on 3 Nov 2013: So so so happy to read your comments and get your thank yous!!! :)))) I'm going to add bits of my stroy when I can but I can't do it all in go so please, please be patient !! girls, I'd tried some fillers and some botox and after a while I realize they won’t work anymore. Natural or unnatural, they don’t last. Updated on 25 Dec 2013: One of the big things I was wondering before the op was what to say when I’m back. I’d though about saying I’ve been working out and taking loads of vitamins and green shakes and doing yoga and pilates and maybe also that I’ve been fasting and detoxing like mad. Now I’m six months post op and I know what it’s really like. People who know you, they don’t say anything, that you’re looking really good, they kind of just look, at least in my case. In the early days, like after two weeks, they said you can see it is going to be very beautiful, they didn’t say yet, how beautiful but they said it is going to be really beautiful! Updated on 10 Mar 2014: Thanks so much for your comments and sorry I haven't been writing!! I'll be here more often now, promise! @Ruz888, yes, three months was when it all started really looking great!! You gott tobe patient! @susan022 OK!! I've got a side-by-side photo. Here it is. I didn't wait that long to go out in public though. My husband works for a sports team and there are a lot of people who come there and after two weeks he needed someone to work so I worked there, behind the counter and the women, I mean, there was still swelling, I mean the people who didn’t know me wouldn’t see it but the people who know me, I thought they’d ask me, what happened? And you know what happened? The women didn’t ask a thing and one or two men who I knew really well came up to me and asked, what happened to you? This was after two weeks when the swelling was still there (but mostly gone). men in general always said, you look very well, in fact after the first two weeks when there was still swelling and it was a little bit blue, men I knew very well would say, it’s going to look really good, men I didn’t know didn’t say anything. The men I knew and who I told I’d had work done said, you can see it’s going to be beautiful. ? It’s not just that you look younger, that was not my only goal. I’ll always tell people my age if they ask but also what I want is that people look at me and they say, you look very well. It’s also that if you feel more secure about yourself, you stand up straight and you look, well before the op, perhaps you’re a little bit shy or you hold yourself back and now after the op, I’m there and feeling right and other people can just feel it. I’m not afraid to look at people. It started a lot earlier when I realised that I wanted to do something. People always said to me you look good for your age but I finally realised that I did this thing of always looking into the mirror into my own face STRAIGHT ON and so it made me think, oh, no, it’s ok, it always looks like I’m 45, no problem, but then one day they made a video of me for an interview and they took a shot of me from the side, that was when I really saw my profile for the first time and when I saw that, I was like, NO! That's when I knew. I’d already had a few pictures from holidays which I didn’t like and I used to just delete them and think, oh no, just a bad camera angle or the wrong picture or I wasn’t feeling well, or I wasn’t smiling in the picture but when I watched the video of that interview, I was thinking, no, that’s not my face anymore. I realised it was really going fast now, over two years time I saw so many things happen in my face, I was thinking no and it's the neck where you really see it (if you're brave enough to look!) The Neck is really important, I thought but also the eyes, brow, cheeks and, some filler where it needs to go. Not too risky like a SMAS and not gone after a few months like a filler. So an extended MACS lift is what I chose. Especially when I saw a friend that Dr Van Den Berge and Dr Vermeulen had treated, they did the new techniques with the MACS lift, I was thinking, this is something I have to do. OK I'll write more later!!!! Updated on 30 Jul 2014: So so sorry it's taken me so long to write!! Busy, busy, busy!!! Anyway, no more apologies! Back to the story, here's what I did. Of course, I checked out doctors on the internet but a girlfriend told me she’d had a MACS lift done by Dr Van Den Berge in Belgium and had a great result. I know I’d seen her and thought like, WOW!! Those cheekbones, skin smooth, eyes perky – after she’d had it done, she’d kinda glowed afterwards and still does. She's a lot younger than me and for me, I’m married with a family and now life is settled but I spoke to her about it a lot. She told me that Dr Van Den Berge works in the place where they invented the MACS lift so their team has been doing it longer than anyone else. Her result was what got me though and it kinda sealed the deal so I flew over to Belgium to see the guy. I googled Dr Van Den Berge with the words 'facelift doctor' and found him easily enough. Spoke to a guy called Nick Baron who set everything up. Turns out Dr Van Den Berge works with another surgeon Dr Vermeulen. (Christian and Sean!! ;) )Two of them do everything together, they operate, they do the consultations, they even drew the lines on me together – not bad having two plastic surgeons working on me at the same time, I thought. The clinic is full of equipment, the staff all kitted out in neat little matching tunics, coffee and biscuits and little breakout rooms. They showed me the recovery room once the surgery is done, they showed me the operating theatre which has some kind of air purefier hhanging from the deck so no bad germs can get in – all sorts of bottles and microscopes. When I first started looking into it, I only wanted to do the underside of my face, my neck and my jaw, because that was something that I hated about myself, and also the lines around my mouth, the laughter lines – they were not laughing any more! ? But during the consultation, Dr Van Den Berge explained to me that he also wanted to do my eyes and I was pretty scared about having my eyes done, because I always thought that my eyes were beautiful, but I guess that was when I was 18 years old and to be honest after I look at the pictures and I look now at my own eyes after the facelift, I think that now I have got my eyes back from when I was very, very young ? But in the first place, I was a little worried, like, no I don’t want to do my eyes, because I’m happy about my eyes but he explained to me that I can’t just do half of my face, if I’m going to do a facelift then I’ve got to do it completely. He asked me to bring some photos when I was 20, 30, 40 and…. ;)…to see how my face was when I was young and he used a picture, my wedding picture and he said, Ok, I’m going to work towards that picture and when I saw that picture again, I said, Yep! Do that!! ? I think that was when I really decided and when Dr Van Den Berge and Dr Vermeulen were explaining what they were going to do and why they wanted to do it, I knew they’re very good specialists so who am I to say no, you have to do it this way or that way. No, I trusted them completely and that’s necessary, if you give your face to someone, you have to trust him. Long story, short, got back, thought about it, checked with some friends, did some soul-searching and decided… go for it!! So that's it for now! I've added the photos from my wedding that the doctors asked me for this time! In the first photo you can see me before the operation on the left, there's a photo from my wedding album in the middle and the one on the right is after the operation. They said they would use these old photos as a guide and I think they did really well, see for yourself! OK, next time I'll write about the actual operation. Those photos aren't so nice YIKES!!! But it was all good in the end. Please, please, please let me know what you think!!! xxxxxx
