Rhinoplasty
Atlanta, Georgia
Nose Surgery Questions
Am I a good candidate for nose surgery?
If you feel uncomfortable about the size or shape of your nose, you could be a good rhinoplasty candidate. You would need to have appropriate expectations, as nose surgery will not change who you are. It will also not change your entire appearance, so if you feel unhappy with your facial appearance in general, you might want to consider other facial plastic surgery as well as Rhinoplasty. Many people have a chin augmentation along with nose surgery to keep their facial features well-balanced.
It is best to wait until adolescent facial growth is finished, and that would be around age 15 for girls and a little later for boys.
What can rhinoplasty do for me?
Rhinoplasty is surgery to reshape the nose. Plastic Surgeon in Atlanta, Dr. Kim can customize your nose surgery according to your goals and the issues that you and he will discuss during preparation. This plastic surgery can make many types of change:
- Nose width
- Removal of humps
- Nostril size and position
- Total nose size
- The angle at the nose tip
- Correction of asymmetry
As well as making these cosmetic improvements, rhinoplasty can improve your breathing. If you have a deviated septum, Dr. Kim can straighten it to make the two nostrils equal in size. The septum is the hard wall between the nostrils, made of cartilage and bone. If it deviates from the center, one nostril is smaller, which may make nasal breathing difficult. For examples of how nose surgery can change your appearance, please see our Before and After photos for rhinoplasty.
Does nose surgery hurt?
The rhinoplasty itself will not hurt, as you will be given local anesthetic and a sedative. The anesthetic will block pain and the sedative will relax you, which also has a pain-reducing effect. When these drugs wear off you will have a certain amount of pain for a few days, and Dr. Kim will give you a prescription for a painkiller.
How long is the nose surgery recovery period?
Surgical recovery periods are usually thought of in two phases: immediate recovery and long-term recovery. Immediate recovery for rhinoplasty is two to four weeks. In that time, the slight bleeding will stop, most of the bruising and swelling will go down, discomfort will recede, and Dr. Kim will remove any stitches or nasal packing. You may have a protective splint over your nose to help it keep its new shape as it heals. In some cases there may also be a soft splint inside the nose.
After four weeks, there may be some residual swelling. It could take a year to completely disappear, depending on your particular surgery and how your body heals. Your final results would therefore not be evident for up to a year, so you must plan on being patient.
How is a rhinoplasty done?
There are many ways of doing nose surgery, so there is no fixed procedure. Your nose surgery could take 15 minutes, three hours, or even longer, depending on what Dr. Kim is doing for you.
However, there are two general types of rhinoplasty:
- A closed procedure – where the incisions are made only inside the nose;
- An open procedure – where an incision is also made across the columella (the fleshy part between the nostrils. This incision enables Dr. Kim to raise the soft tissue that covers the nose and gives him access to the bone and cartilage on the nasal bridge.
Nose size can be reduced by removing some of the bone and cartilage; or it can be increased with a graft. Dr. Kim could take cartilage from the septum or from elsewhere on the body such as the ear or the ribs and use it to enlarge or reshape the nose.
To learn more about rhinoplasty and how it might benefit you, please contact our office today for a personal nose surgery consultation. We offer facial plastic surgery to residents of Atlanta, Georgia and we hope to meet with you soon.
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