Stay Away

The things you need to understand about Bart van de Ven are the following: a) he thinks he is a skilled surgeon, b) his idea of skill is to make "bold" changes to his patients' faces; c) his idea of "bold" changes is to cut as much bone as possible regardless of whether this is necessary to feminise the patient's face; d) he has no idea what is necessary to feminise a patient's face.
I would like to say that, despite (d), at least he knows how to cut bone. Unfortunately, I can't say that. In my case the operation to recontour my forehead left me with a hole in the bone above my right eyebrow, which required a revision to close it with bone cement. To this day, I have no idea what happened to my face during that operation. I asked, but all I was told is that the hole was a "nick". Why was there a nick in my forehead? What exactly did he do to me? I guess we'll never know. But, hey- at least the operation was "bold". If it was any bolder, he'd have put a "nick" to my brain.
But hang on, I hear you say. Complications happen. What about the good results of the surgery? What about the feminisation of my face, that I was promised and paid a good deal of hard-earned money for?
Well, I can tell you that I looked way more feminine before the operation than I do now. Why? Because the operation left me with a bundle of skin hanging around my jaw and chin which makes me look at least 10 years older than I am and which, to be frank, makes me look as ugly as all hell.
What does ugly and old have to do with feminine? Ask Bart van der Ven. Or rather, go find his scholarly article about FFS, where he asserts that younger and prettier faces register as more feminine. Mine looks older and uglier after his surgery, and that makes me look more masculine. I had not been called a "gentleman" in 15 years before the operation. It happened within a year of the surgery with Bart van de Ven. And that was a year because it took me a year to find the courage to venture outside my house, looking like he made me look.
Where should I stop? Let me tell you about my mouth. I used to have a full, sensual mouth. Now my mouth looks like someone kicked my teeth in. See, because of how Bart van de Ven likes to do the stitching of an intra-oral incision, my mouth is now pulled back against my teeth and down towads my chin, so that it's half its original size. Besides the fact that this ruined my mouth, it also causes saliva to leak from the corners of my lips all the time and I have developed contact dermatitis as a result.
When I complained about my mouth, I was told by Bart van de Ven that it is better this way. When I responded with incredulity, he insisted that it's more feminine to have a smaller mouth. He proceeded to tell me a little story: once week his father, who is also a maxillofacial surgeon, comes to watch him operate. When it comes time to suture the intra-oral incision, his dad instructs him to suture it so as to make the crease under the lower lip deeper. And Bart van de Ven always wags his finger, laughs playfully and sutures the incision so as to make that crease shallower- and your lower lip shorter. He did that to me. Without warning me. And he had every opportunity to do so. I told him three times -three times- that "I like my mouth the way it is and I don't want it to change" because he kept offering me an upper lip lift. That would have been the perfect chance to let me know that there was an option during the surgery, that would strongly affect my appearance afterwards. He didn't say a word. He went on and did whatever he liked. With my face.

There are so many things that went wrong with my operation (two operations, actually- I had a revision) that I didn't know what to put in my original comment and what to leave out. So here's Part II.

But first- let me say what procedures I had done. I had a type 1 forehead recontouring, with the incision placed behind the hairline, to Bart van der Ven's insistence (I wanted my hairline lowered, but he said my skin was not elastic enough). I had a jaw and chin reduction and recontouring (by bone shaving and cutting). And lipofilling of the nasolabial folds and around the cheeks under the eyes.

Every single one of those procedures went wrong. Every. Single. One.

I already discussed my forhead and how I ended up with a "nick" that needed revision. The revision of course required to re-open the incision behind my hairline. The reopened incision caused a great deal of hair to fall out, which fortunately grew back, eventually. In the meantime, if you squint a bit you can see in the new picture I post here that the hair loss revealed the scar that was left behind my hairline. It's not a good picture so you can't see it very well and I don't have a better one, sorry. However, you shouldn't be able to see it at all, as I'm already five months post-op in that picture. You can see it even under my hair because it's no ordinary scar: it's a deep gash, perhaps 2mm deep, that runs around the top of my forhead like an inverted smile. That scar, too, was never explained and when I asked about it I was asked back by Bart van der Ven "why do these things only happen to you?". So, it's my fault. I guess? Maybe I didn't do the staples right? Perhaps because I was out cold because of all the Propofol?

I should also point out that placing the incision behind my hairline made my forehead taller and wider and pulled my hairline back on one side. So my forehead now looks huge, like a hot air baloon. Not exactly feminising.

By the way, the revision wasn't much better than the original surgery. My forhead doesn't look like I was attacked witha claw hammer, anymore, but I can still feel a slight depression where the "nick" was originally. Is it possible the bone cement has gotten loose?

I already discussed the hanging skin around my jaw. I've added two pictures that were taken within 16 months of each other (February 2016 to June 2017). Have a look and see if you think it's possible for someone to age that much in a year or so.

Yes, folks. That's me: I paid a small fortune to acquire a pair of jowls and a double chin that I wasn't going to get until my sixties otherwise. Let me also point out the line that runs under my chin at a jaunty angle. That is no wrinkle. That is a scar. The scar tissue is on the inside- but it's a scar. Perhaps there's a medical term for it. Is it an adhesion? Again, I have no idea because I was give no explanation of how I ended up with this disfiguring feature as a result of "cosmetic" surgery. Instead Bart first dismissed the whole thing with a laugh at 4 months, then he told me it wouldn't get better with a facelift, at 9 months, and finally told me to lose weight, fatso, after he finally agreed to a facelift that made it even worse (and I paid half of it so not really a revision).

I was given no explanation of how a scar will get better if I lose weight. In any case, I did lose weight- I lost 18.2kgs since I was told to lose weight to fix the scar that Bart van der Ven gave me. Despite the weight loss I have seen no improvement in the appearance of the scar, or the jowls and double chin. Maybe I need to lose those extra 200gs? Nah, it's all water retention anyway.

Well guess what. Shortly after this review was posted, Bart's lawyers sent an official letter threatening with legal action unless the review was taken down.
Now, imagine for a second that you had surgery to remove, say, your tonsils, and that as a result of this surgery you acquired a permanent facial disfigurement. And suppose that you posted, on an internet forum dedicated to reviewing doctors performing tonsilectomies, an honest review describing the surgery, its results, and its impact on your life. Do you think that any doctor would ever consider it fitting to then threaten to sue you for discussing the results of your surgery (_your_ surgery) in public?
Of course not. Any doctor worth the title is a professional whose primary role is to care for other peoples bodies (or their minds). The priority of a doctor worthy of the title is, always, the well-being of the patient, and while of course every doctor (every professional!) would wish to defend their good reputation, this would come a very distant second, or third, in the list of priorities of an actual doctor, who actually cares for his or her patients.
Let me repeat now that I have not, so far, received any sort of apology, formal or informal, from Bart van de Ven, with regards to the damage that his surgery has caused me. It took a whole meeting (our last meeting) before Bart mustered the self- respect required to even acknowledge that a number of mistakes were made during the surgery and that, as a result of thos mistakes, the outcome of the sugery he performed was a bad outcome. That meeting lasted half an hour and in all that time Bart, and his wife and business partner, Helen, went out of their way to assure me that there was nothing that Bart himself could do to improve this bad result, that Bart could not do anything to correct this bad result, that this bad result was, after all, "not that bad", that, ultimately, I was somehow responsible for this bad result and that this bad result would improve if I "lost some weight". All this, like I say, without for a second admiting that the result was bad, aesthetically, and in every other way.
Helen in particular was downright aggressive in her tone and posture, and exhibited callous disregard for my well-being, when she noted that she would only accept that a revision was necessary if I was saying that "I can't live with the result". Consider again what this means: that Helen would only accept that a revision was needed if the result was so bad as to cause me to become suicidal.
This aggression, and this total disregard for the well-being of me, as a patient, and of the impact of Bart's mistakes during my surgery at his hands, continue with the threatening letter sent by his lawyers. This letter is a clear indication that the only thing that Bart cares is his bottom line, and his business. He cares not a jot about what happens after he has performed the surgery and received the payment for it.
In view of all the above, then, let me repeat my advice that you should stay well away from Bart van de Ven and that you should not let him get anywhere near your face with his incompetently, and irresponsibly, wielded kinves. That is- if you hold anything dear about your face as it is now, if there is anything about your face that you find attractive or feminine, then stay away.
And if you expect to be cared for by a doctor worthy of the title, who will honour his word that he will revise any bad results free of charge, or that his ultimate goal is to help transwomen "pass", then again stay away and look somewhere else because this is all so much marketing copy and nothing more.
Otherwise, if you really, really hate yourself and you just want a new face, any new face, even a disfigured, scarred, and unnatural-looking face, and if you don't care about looking in the mirror to see a plastic surgery disaster for the rest of your life, as I have to... then go ahead and book FFS with Bart van de Ven. You will not be disappointed.