10 years ago, on impulse, I had Aquafilling injected into my breasts. I believed without question what the doctor said: that it would be naturally absorbed and disappear, and that it would last about 8 years. After that, I spent years regretting it, and every time I saw my breasts swollen and hardened, I blamed my foolish self and suffered. In the end, I decided to have it removed and booked consultations at Foret Plastic Surgery, which was often mentioned in an online community, and at OO Surgery. As I read every post on the blog run by Director Kim Min-young of Foret Plastic Surgery, I started to feel hopeful, wondering, if this is true, whether I could finally be freed from this. That was because only Foret Plastic Surgery met the condition of “maximum removal with scars that are not visible.” However, because there is a problem of information asymmetry in the medical field, and because I did not want to repeat my rash decision from the past, I also booked a consultation at OO Surgery, which advertises itself as having “20 years of experience, able to perform the axillary approach as well, but using the inframammary incision as the safer method.”
I visited Foret Plastic Surgery first, and since I had watched almost all of the videos on YouTube, when I first saw Director Kim Min-young in person, it felt like seeing a celebrity, and it was fascinating. In particular, her eyes were really bright and sparkling, and her sharp gaze gave off the aura of a surgeon who is good at operating.
I had prepared a list of questions before the consultation, and she told me to ask everything, so I asked easily around 20 questions. Even for questions that could only have felt unpleasant, such as “doubting the director’s skill or experience” or asking “whether the real reviews were actually real and not advertisements,” she answered sincerely and in a way that was easy to understand, without showing any displeasure. Maybe because she is young, she did not have an authoritarian attitude, and it seemed like she was trying to provide accurate information to the patient. I thought that if it had been the doctors I had met up until now, I might have been kicked out. During the consultation, I kept thinking that I just wanted to do it here and did not want to go anywhere else. More than anything, I thought the fact that she keeps and shows endoscopic photos before and after surgery for each patient showed confidence in her skill. I also liked that the surgery would be done under “sedation anesthesia,” not general anesthesia, which had been one of my major concerns.
Even so, because the trauma from having made a rash choice in the past left me with a compulsion to compare options, she confidently told me, “You can understand why you should choose an endoscopic surgical method through an axillary incision if you think about it logically,” and “Filler injection was putting a foreign material in, and now this is removing it. I will remove as much as possible.” Since doctors usually speak ambiguously, this helped me make a rational judgment, and I decided on Foret Plastic Surgery right away. That same day, I had the preoperative tests at the affiliated internal medicine clinic, and we decided to proceed with surgery the next day.
To briefly share what I felt about the hospital’s operations, I thought it was fast, organically coordinated, and systematic. From the consultation booking process to the preoperative testing process, everything proceeded smoothly, and they supported the patient at the right times without leaving me confused or unsure where to go.
I will write the surgery review next time. Thank you for reading this long post.