Wonderful experience! For me, it's been worth every penny

I started my journey with Dr. Shah in Sept 2020 and have had an absolutely wonderful experience. I would ABSOLUTELY recommend him to anyone who's unhappy with anything about their face. I have a ton to say, so I'll start out with a shorter review for people who want the executive summary, and then go into the nitty-gritty for people who are interested in all the gory details. In a nutshell, Dr. Shah is a total pro with a refined (not over-the-top!) aesthetic sense, who also happens to be a good guy who will not overcharge you (his prices are very reasonable!), and will also make sure you're happy with your results. If you're like I was when I started researching plastic surgeons (i.e. utterly terrified of putting my face in the wrong hands), you might be tempted to go with an older surgeon, someone with decades and decades of doing face lifts and nose jobs, the idea being that an older surgeon is a safer move. Well, I'm here to say, forget that!! Dr. Shah is young (mid-40's?) and looks way younger than he actually is, but he has plenty of experience, and since he ONLY does facial work, that means he probably has several times the amount of experience and expertise as an older surgeon who does body and facial work. I also now suspect that a younger surgeon may be more knowledgeable of new cutting-edge techniques and might give you better results for that reason.



Thanks to Dr. Shah, I now look dramatically younger and prettier than I did just over a year ago, and I feel incredibly fortunate and grateful to him for that. (Also pleased with my own good judgment for picking him, I must say!!) It's remarkable what an impact looking more attractive has on a person's mental state too, so I'd say the decision to put my face in his hands has boosted my overall happiness and life satisfaction as well - it's not just about aesthetics! It's even had benefits for my professional life, since I no longer hate to see myself on Zoom and feel more confident speaking in front of people. So if you're hesitating about whether he's the surgeon for you, take it from me - you'll be in good hands.



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OK, for people who want the details:



I started thinking about getting work done just about the time I turned 50. I'd been doing Botox and fillers since my early 30's, but I noticed my brows were drooping and asymmetrical (one lower than the other) and that Botox was actually kind of making it worse, that my eyes were getting more hooded due to loose skin, making my eyes look smaller (it was getting hard to put on eye shadow), and of course, I was also developing those dreaded jowls and sagging neck, even though I didn't really notice them in the mirror, only in photos (which would inevitably depress me!). Although people had always told me I didn't look my age (probably because my skin quality has always been good, as I stay out of the sun), I was starting to see skin laxity that was making me look definitively middle-aged. I even started feeling unhappy with my nose even though it had never bothered me when I was younger. (Apparently the loss of collagen with age can reveal asymmetries in your nose that weren't so obvious at a younger age. Go figure.) After analyzing what I disliked about my 50-year-old face in the mirror and in photos, I concluded that if I wanted to fix everything, I would need quite a bit of work: 1) a facelift; 2) a brow lift; 3) an upper blepharoplasty; 4) a nose job; and 5) a lip lift. So I started doing some research online on facial plastic surgery and plastic surgeons in the Chicago area.



Although I did a ton of online research, I ended up only going on two actual consultations: one with an older surgeon who had almost all great reviews on RealSelf, and Dr. Shah, who also had mostly fantastic reviews. I will confess to initially feeling a certain prejudice against a young good-looking surgeon with a strong social media presence - for some reason my idea of the ideal doctor was someone around 60-65 who looked like someone's grandfather and who had no use for Instagram! I very much liked the older surgeon's demeanor for that reason, as he had a very reassuring, wise and calm presence. However, he admitted to me that he would not be able to create a perfectly sharp neck contour, although he was confident that he could get a significant improvement nonetheless. He suggested I consider a chin implant to create the optical illusion of a more defined contour. This was disconcerting to me because I was wary of putting any foreign object in my face, and also because I don't have a weak chin to begin with, so I worried it would look weird and masculine. This doctor also admitted that he'd only done a couple of lip lifts ever, so he kind of downplayed that procedure as not being very necessary (although I knew I really wanted one). His estimate was around 25k for everything, if I recall correctly. I left feeling torn - I was so scared about the possibility of something going wrong that I really yearned for a veteran surgeon like him, but the chin implant suggestion and his lack of experience with lip lifts made me question whether he was the right guy for me.



Then I went to see Dr. Shah, and he told me what I'd been hoping to hear: that he foresaw no problem whatsoever with getting a sharp neck contour and thought a chin implant was a bad idea; he also said he did about a lip lift a month (if I remember correctly) - not as much as some of those Beverly Hills guys who market themselves as lip specialists, but clearly he had way more experience with lip lifts than the first guy. His specialization was clearly noses, with I think face lifts in close second. I was worried about a botched nose job since I knew this was one of the most difficult procedures to get right and that many people require a revision surgery, so his expertise with that was a big plus for me. (He's also an ear-nose-and throat doctor, so he's trained in that part of the body.) He also recommended fat transfer, which hadn't occurred to me but which struck me as a good idea. So at this point I was already inclined to go with Dr. Shah, but imagine my delight when I discovered he was actually CHEAPER than the first guy! And not by a little - the quote with him was around 18.5k, so we're talking over a 6k difference. He did mention that I was getting a deal because at the time of the consult the coronavirus lockdown had just taken effect and I suppose all plastic surgeons were worried about staying in business, so I guess his prices are higher now. But still. Awesome. I also liked that he was offering me a significant markdown on the lip lift even though that procedure would need to be done considerably later than the other stuff. (Once you become a surgery patient, you get discounts on everything! :))



The surgery itself took several hours longer than anticipated (like 7 hours rather than 5!), and I won't lie: the first 24 hours of recovery were ROUGH. They did not warn me that I would not be able to see well (they put some kind of ointment in my eyes), or walk without help (from the lingering effects of anesthesia), that I would vomit TWICE within the first hour I got home from the anesthesia, that I would have trouble swallowing, trouble eating, and wouldn't be able to sleep!!! I had asked a friend to drive me home, but I didn't expect to need to be taken care of for the next 2 days! She got stuck being my nursemaid for 48 hours and wasn't anticipating that, which made me feel terrible about putting her out. The hardest part about that first 24 hours was that I was exhausted (hadn't slept the night before surgery) but I couldn't stay asleep more than 5 minutes because of some weird after-effect I guess of the nose job, which made swallowing really difficult. So that first 24 hours felt like a week. I don't remember being in much pain, thankfully (I was good at making sure I was properly drugged up), but it was still pretty miserable until Dr. Shah made a house call the next day (a really really nice gesture on his part - it would have been an ordeal to get to his office) to change my headwrap to something softer. During that first 24 hours I couldn't even manage to read or watch TV or ANYTHING. I just lay there trying but unable to stay asleep longer than 5 minutes and trying to drink water and empty my bladder and remember to take my meds. Could barely eat anything even though I'd prepared a bunch of pureed stuff since I knew I wouldn't be able to chew. Yikes. It was bad.



Things improved significantly once Dr. Shah removed the initial headwrap and the anesthesia wore off. I was able to walk and see and sleep more (though still not well) and eat a little. I was scared to look in the mirror, but when I finally got the nerve to look I looked like I'd been run over by a Mack truck. I anticipated that, but still. Yikes!



Things gradually got better and better of course, but I must say that I started stressing out when I hit 2 weeks and still looked incredibly swollen and weird. My whole head looked fat to me, like a Charlie Brown character, and I didn't recognize myself in the mirror. I also had a pain setback at one point (maybe week 2?) when I started feeling pain while eating due to a nerve in my mouth that was affected by the nose job (the swelling descends down your face, which is why I guess it took a while to hit that nerve). They say you can be restaurant-ready in 2 weeks after a face lift, but in my case it took twice that before I felt comfortable showing my face in public. I guess this is due to the fact that I had so many procedures done at once (face lift, nose job, brow lift, upper bleph and fat transfer), but still... I was a bit freaked out from about day 10 to day 30, I'd say, since I would compare myself to after photos on YouTube and was always struck by how much more swollen and weird I looked vs. the patients there, some of whom looked normal after only a week!! NOT ME!!



I must say that a huge advantage of the coronavirus lockdown was that I didn't have to go anywhere except the grocery store and to the park to exercise, and even then I could cover all the [RS bleep] up parts of my face quite easily. Also, when I did have to face my colleagues on Zoom, it was relatively easy to cover up the redness and bruises and incision marks because I knew people would only see my face as a small square on their laptop, and would only see me from one angle that I could control. (Long hair was a blessing.)



My advice to you is double the recovery period your plastic surgeon predicts, just to be safe. In retrospect I could have saved myself a lot of anxiety by assuming I'd look like a hot mess for a full month. I spent a lot of time stressing out about the lie I'd have to tell my colleagues when they first saw me on Zoom (I ended up saying I'd had my wisdom teeth out and that my face was swollen due to that). I hate lying!! So that was hard for me.



I've kept a photo diary of my progress and the interesting thing is that when I look back on the photos I took of myself about a month or 6 weeks out, when I thought I looked pretty normal, I actually look swollen to myself now. So you do need to be patient - my face was wider than normal for probably a good three months, I'd say.



I recently had surgery again with Dr. Shah - a full year post-op - to finally get the lip lift I'd been dying for - as well as to make some tweaks. (FYI, he didn't charge me for any of this except the lip lift, and he honored the original discounted quote from a year ago. Yay!!) I wanted a little more upturn at the tails of my brows, and one nostril was slightly higher than the other, and I'd developed a bit of scar tissue on my nose that created a slight lump (not noticeable probably to anyone but me). It's been maybe 5-6 weeks since that procedure, and now I have to say I'm pretty thrilled with the way I look. It's actually hard for me to make sense of the fact that I'm 51 now, because it just doesn't compute with the way I look in the mirror anymore. The effects of the lip lift and brow/nostril revision are subtle but to me they make all the difference! I still have a bit of an issue with the scar tissue on the nose, but honestly, even if that doesn't ever get fixed perfectly, the truth is that I'm amazed by the improvement when I look back at pre-op photos of myself. There's been a dramatic transformation - and yet!! When I visited my brother and sister-in-law a few months ago (they hadn't seen me since Xmas of 2019), they didn't seem to notice! (I fessed up to my sister-in-law and she claimed she hadn't figured it out on her own - so either that's true or she's a good liar.) So I must still look like myself. Some of my friends did know immediately I'd done something, but some apparently didn't (or again, they're good liars). So... yeah...it's weird... (I plan to fess up right away if anyone asks. Not ashamed!)



I'm sorry for not having the balls to post pre- and post-op photos, as I imagine if you've read this far you're probably curious to see them! I take my hat off to the brave people who have publicly posted their pics because they really helped me when making my own decision, but I just don't feel comfortable doing that. Readers, you'll just have to trust me (and the hundreds of other reviewers) when I tell you that Dr. Shah is a great surgeon and a trustworthy businessman who stands by his promises. If you're unhappy with your face, schedule a consult with him. You won't be sorry. For me, it's been worth every penny.