I know we talk about the way we do breast augmentation that minimizes patient discomfort and makes for a quick recovery but I wanted to share some patient comments from her return some 6 weeks after a silicone gel breast augmentation. She said she went out to lunch on the way home because she felt hungry. We operated on her on a Friday morning. She attended a dinner party on Saturday and went to church on Sunday. After two pain pills on Friday evening, she took only Tylenol. She then went to work on Monday as usual. Talk about quick recovery, that’s almost no recovery. While I believe her story is extraordinary, we have seen that our patients, when they compare their recovery experience to patients of other practices, seem to say that they have experienced less downtime than what they hear about from others. I do think that the attention to detail, gentle tissue handling, almost no bleeding all contribute to this kind of result. Malcolm Gladwell, in his prize winning book, Outliers, talks about having to put 10,000 hours into whatever your chosen area of expertise in order to be great at it. After 20 years and thousands of breast augmentations, I can see what he means. Breast augmentation in our office can be a weekend recovery for most patients. This makes for happy patients and a happier physician.
