Vaser Lipo to Jawline, Abs, and Flanks - Katowice, Poland

This is a review 18 months in the making! It is long so here is the exec summary: I had vaser lipo to my jawline, abs and flanks under general anesthesia at the Body Asthetic Clinic (also known as MekMed) in Katowice, Poland. It cost £3,400 and the result is excellent. I recommend the surgeons there - but you'll need to be prepared to manage your own aftercare.

Now the long version: I am a 37 yo male, living in London. When I was in my late 20s I gave up smoking and took up eating in its place. My oral fixation ranged from ice cream to apples. Consequently I gained a lot of weight in the space of a few months and stayed like that for about a year. Once I got a grip of myself I subsequently lost most of the weight and have kept it off since, but by that stage I seemed to have permanently changed my physiology. I was left with a sort of flabbiness that I hadn't had previously and which wouldn't go away. For example, I had grown a 'double chin' which wouldn't go away even when I tried a diet and exercise kick which got my weight right down.

So I started looking at lipo to remove my love handles, flabby abdomen, and jowls. I did my research and decided vaser lipo was the best option and so I then starting looking at clinics and prices. I work in the health field so I knew that with all things medical and surgical it's best to find a Dr and team who have had a lot of practice with the particular procedure in question. The more they do of it, the better they will generally be at it.

My initial order of preference based on reviews on this site and similar ones as well as my research on the surgeons was Dr Ravi Jain of the Riverbanks Clinic and then Dr Bassi from Selston. Dr Jain I ruled out early on as simply too expensive. So I emailed Dr Bassi and got a reply from his assistant Mags saying they could do the procedure to all three areas for £4,000. I liked the idea of Dr Bassi. He is a GP rather than a surgeon, but he has done a huge amount of vaser lipo and consistently gets good reviews. So I went to see him and Mags at their Selston clinic in Nottingham. At the consultation Dr Bassi said they'd do the procedures in three separate sessions six weeks apart. This is because he does his surgery under local anesthesia which limits the amount that can be done in each session (due to the danger of Lidocaine toxicity). He also said the price would be £7,000 not the £4,000 Mags had quoted. That was quite annoying. I didn't like the idea of months of separate surgery sessions followed by recovery, and £7k was more than I was prepared to pay.

So I went back to the internet. When I was researching Dr Jain I noted a posting saying that he had taught vaser techniques to a Polish surgeon called Dr Henryk Mekle a year earlier. I did some research on Dr Mekle, including on Polish forums (using google translate) and discovered that while (at that stage) he was relatively new to vaser he had been doing lipo for many years and he had good feedback from his (mostly Polish) patients. So I jumped on a Ryanair flight and went and saw Dr Mekle and his associate Dr Alex Balogun at their Katowice clinic. They were great. I spent a good hour with them and they answered all my questions clearly and honestly. Unlike in the UK, the cost of general anesthesia is not prohibitive in Poland so they would be able to do the procedure in one go under GA at a cost of £3,400. It's worth noting here that GA is not necessarily more risky than local. Lipo requires a lot of Lidocaine when performed under local anesthesia and the dangers of Lidocaine toxicity (which can cause organ damage and potentially even death) are real. So I booked in for the procedure on a Thursday in a months time.

I flew in Katowice the night before and stayed in a hotel nearby the clinic. At 8am I rocked up and by 9am I was in surgery. I woke up several hours later to be told by the good docs that everything had gone fine. I stayed that night in the clinic and the nurses ensured that I wasn't in too much pain and tried to get me to eat. I was discharged the following morning and stayed one night in a hotel in Katowice before flying home. (In retrospect, I could have just gone straight home). I was back at work on the Monday, no problem.

The post-operative pain really wasn't too bad. For about a week it was my abdomen that gave some pain - bending over was especially bad. But mostly it's uncomfortable rather than painful. The lipo'd areas got itchy and then tingly and then numb for weeks (even months in one area) afterwards. I got lymphatic drainage massage a couple of times a week for the first few weeks which was very uncomfortable. And of course there's the dreaded compression garment which is also uncomfortable. Interestingly, I researched use of both massage and compression garments post lipo and discovered there is no clear consensus amongst surgeons on either. Most say they are both necessary to reduce swelling (probably true) and get a better cosmetic result (probably just conjecture). But there is really no objective evidence one way or another. I decided that I would simply follow my surgeon's instructions, and so I wore the garment more or less 24/7 for several weeks, and I got the massages. I've no idea if they made any difference or not...

The worst part post surgery was probably the anxiety and self questioning that I went through: Are these unusual skin sensations normal (yes); will they ever stop or am I going to feel numb under my chin forever (normal feeling did come back after awhile); Will the lumps and bumps ever disappear? (Yes); Will the swelling ever go down (it did after two or three weeks).

In the end it was a few months before everything felt completely normal and I could see the very final result. It is great. People ask me all the time if I've lost weight. I actually haven't - my weight is almost the same as before lipo - but the change to my silhouette is what makes the difference. For the first time in a decade I'm no longer self conscious about my body. That makes it all worth it.