A lot of people probably look into pin removal after facial contouring surgery or double jaw surgery, but there aren’t many reviews or much information, so you may be worrying about it I was the same
First, do you need to remove the pins? Opinions are divided between “you should” and “you don’t have to,” and some people may not even know about pin removal at all. When I had zygoma surgery, the clinic only told me that they would fix it with pins, and they never talked to me about something called pin removal. Maybe they don’t mention it because everyone would hesitate more if they said you might need another surgery for pin removal
After my zygoma surgery, it was only after a year had passed that I found a post saying you should remove the pins, so I hurriedly looked it up First, my conclusion is that pin removal is ultimately a personal choice, but I think it should be done. They say it is a material used for implants and that it is biocompatible, but it is embedded inside the face, and the face moves a lot while eating and chewing. After a long time, like 10 or 20 years, the pins could break, and if a problem occurs later, they become much harder to remove. I also know that implants often need to be replaced with new ones if they are used for a long time. And I have a scar from an injury when I was young, and even that old scar sometimes gets itchy and red when my body isn’t doing well, you know? Right now I’m young so it’s okay, but when I get older, will my immunity or health be the same as now? Even if it is fine now, inflammation and problems could occur decades later, so rather than suffering then because it is much harder to remove, I thought it would be better to completely eliminate that risk now, when removal is easier and I’m healthy, and become fully my own bone? So I had the pins removed this time!
I’m one week out now, and the reason I recommend pin removal even more is that after doing it, it was really less serious than I expected! Of course, this is also surgery, but it honestly felt about as difficult as having 3 wisdom teeth removed! I actually think it was much better than having 3 wisdom teeth removed! Eating is much easier than after wisdom teeth removal lol. It doesn’t hurt that much after surgery either! There are stitches from the incision inside the mouth, but my teeth are intact and my zygomatic bones are intact, so as long as it’s not spicy, I can just chew and eat! If zygoma surgery was difficulty level 10, pin removal is about level 3–4? It can be done under sedation anesthesia, and after sleeping for about an hour and waking up, it was over. Because it was sedation anesthesia, it wasn’t especially hard even after waking up! The one bad thing is that if you have pins in the lateral zygoma, you need an incision near the ear/sideburn area! You just take care of it for a week, get the stitches removed, then manage the scar afterward, and once the sideburn hair grows back, it’s okay. The incision is only 1 cm too, and the incision area is much smaller than during zygoma surgery! Inside the mouth, they use dissolvable stitches. It may differ from person to person, but for me, it didn’t hurt much for a week, and although the swelling was significant, it is going down a lot day by day.
And what really made me think I was glad I did it was that after the surgery ended and I woke up, they took another X-ray and showed me whether everything had been removed properly. Seeing that all the pins that had been embedded there in an unpleasant-looking way were gone and everything was clean made me feel so relieved and happy!
I hope everyone considers pin removal at least once!