45 - Rhino, Lower Bleph, and Platysmaplasty - Charlotte, NC

I went to my pre-op visit two days ago and my nerves are starting to mount. My surgery is on Jan 28, and the lovely Nurse Jean at Dr. Freeman's guided me through all the pre-/post-op instructions at my visit. I'm starting my review because I have seen the power of a supportive community in others' posts about their journeys. I hope to benefit from that support as well, and feed back into it for someone else down the line. I'll post pictures in a day or two so you can see the starting point of my journey.

Okay, here are my before pics. I have never been very in love with my features, and worse, they make me look so like my dad, which just made already wretched relations with my mom worse than they may have been otherwise. I know ideally I should just accept myself as I am, but after many years of working hard to convince myself of this, I am dropping the charade. I wanted to wait until I saw what my daughters' noses would look like first, then saw that one has her own very unique nose and the other has her dad's quite nice one. Seriously, I don't know where the older one gets her sweet nose--DNA is beyond amazing.

Anywho, I blotted out my eyes as little as possible because I am in total getting a lower bleph with SOOF lift, rhino, and medial platysmaplasty as well as CO2 laser under my eyes and around my super-wrinkly lips (no smoking, just too much whistling), and I thought it would be helpful if others could see the before and after on all areas. Yeah, I'll be a hot mess for awhile after this.

I'm getting my procedures done on a Thursday, and taking that Thursday and Friday off work. I'm hoping that, between the weekend and those two days, I'll have enough time to return to lucidity before returning to work. I work full time from home, so I have the flexibility to show up greatly less than esthetically pleasing. ;-)

I've submitted my prescriptions already so I could shop the prices without being in a rush (check GoodRX.com if you want to compare prices to your current coverage or if you're filling for an uninsured pet, etc.). Tomorrow I'm shopping my list of supplies that I've culled from other reviews and the nurse's recommendations.

Happy healing to all of you already on your journey!

I forgot to mention that I'm also getting an alar base reduction to bring down the size of my nostrils. However, Dr F says he won't do this until he sees how my nose heals, since it's not something that he feels can be reliably predicted. That will take place 2-3 months after my initial rhino under local anesthetic. Not looking forward to a second procedure, but I trust his opinion and want it done right, of course. Because of this, I'm afraid I will look worse before I look better, although I suppose I would have gone through that anyway with all the healing, right? It's just that now I'll have to heal twice, and stay out of view twice. I'm not sharing far and wide about this (oh, the irony of posting that here!)--just my husband, RN-mom-like friend, and BF-since-second-grade-already-had-rhino friend. I'm so concerned about nose issues that I'm not really paying attention to my eyelid stuff, but that seems more straightforward.

I got my supplies and will be picking up my prescriptions today. I also picked up a few button-down shirts...oddly, I had exactly zero in my closet. Another friend who had rhino was very definite in her opinion to me that I would want those after surgery. Another girlfriend is an RN, and she has agreed to care for me at her house for a couple of days so I can be relieved of family duty. From there, my next task is to avoid neighbors, which hopefully won't be too hard with the cold weather. We tend to send the kids out to play ("it's not THAT cold, mom"--55F!), and use them as carrier pigeons to relay stuff to any neighbors that need to borrow something.

I have so much work, I can barely think about the surgery! And now to return to the grind...