I have a really ugly face, you know. I have a retruded chin, my face shape is round, my eyes have double eyelids but they’re subtly sleepy-looking, and my nose shape was like those newborn babies’ nosesㅋㅋ you know, just the nasal alae protrude roundly, and the nose itself is really smallㅋㅋㅋ That’s exactly how it was.
After I graduated from college, my dad told me to fix my face a bit, so I was like, huh, then is it my eyes? and went around to 6-7 places. But every single one, even double-eyelid specialist clinics, said, “First, try fixing your nose.”.. For my eyes, opinions were half do it / half don’t.
So what did I need to do? I had to do my nose. I immediately went to a nose-specialist hospital said to be good at noses and got a CT scan, and oh my god, one side of my nasal cartilage was completely blocked, so it was not functioning as an airway at all. On top of that, they said my nose was deviated too. They said functionally, this was absolutely a nose that needed surgery, so I went around to two or three more nose-specialist hospitals..
I was in the “I’ll be satisfied if it doesn’t look obvious and just makes me look like a normal person!!” camp (I know the limits of my face), so they suggested doing deviated septum surgery and using that cartilage to build up the nose. Back then, I knew nothing about bulbous noses or anything like that, and thought that just raising the height a bit would make it better. The doctor also said that even with correction of the deviated nose, if they raised the height, it couldn’t help but show, and that my deviated septum was so severe it made them wonder how I had been living day to day, and my nasal bridge was basically nonexistent, so an implant absolutely had to be inserted.
So I had general anesthesia and got nose surgery.. More than anything else, functionally my nose opened up completely, and I found a new life.. Damn, breathing through my nose is so good. I had lived almost my whole life without knowing this. The shape got way better than before, and it blended into my face so naturally that people didn’t even know I had surgery and thought it was my natural nose, so I was satisfiedㅎㅎ and lived like that for about 5? 6 years. I did feel things like scarring at the incision area and my nasal skin becoming sensitive, but I don’t think I considered them major side effects and just let time pass.
Then little by little, a person gets greedy.. I have a bulbous nose with wide nasal alae, so every time I took photos, my alar width bothered me so much. I looked like a gorilla, and when I smiled, it looked like a monkey nose twitching, like one whole ape.. This time, after finishing my graduate school semester, I went in for revision rhinoplasty with alar reduction (as soon as the director who did my surgery saw me again, they said my alae needed to be reduced ㅂㄷㅂㄷ) + making the nasal tip a little sharper + checking the silicone condition and replacing it if needed + rhinitis surgery because the inner tissue might have sagged. They said it wouldn’t change dramatically, and I asked them not to make it excessive but to save as much as they could, and got the surgery. That was yesterday......
Honestly, I don’t think my alae were reduced a huge amount, but even that small reduction changes the impression a lot, so I’m keeping my head in a flower field, believing it went well, and trying not to worry while focusing on recovery. From now on, unless something really happens, I’m never touching my nose againㅋㅋ