<Before nose surgery><At 2 weeks, my nose looked so awkward..><By 2 months, it had healed a lot!> Make sure you research your first surgery well. I casually went around for consultations thinking it would be fine, and I seriously almost got burned..;; I split my consultations into two rounds, round 1 and round 2. Usually for a first nose surgery, septal cartilage and ear cartilage are used a lot, right? At the hospitals I visited for the first round, after taking a CT, they said the septal cartilage inside my nose was too small to use.. They said my nose couldn’t be supported with septal cartilage alone, yeah. So they told me to choose between autologous costal cartilage or donated costal cartilage for surgery, but since I still had my second round of consultations left, I just said okay for the time being. But at the hospital I went to during the second round of consultations, they took an X-ray and said my autologous costal cartilage was calcified. Honestly, I didn’t even know exactly what that meant, so I was totally confused, but the director explained everything to me directly. After hearing that, I wondered, then why did the previous hospitals say autologous costal cartilage was possible too?.. They said calcification doesn’t show on a regular CT and only shows if you take an X-ray, so if I hadn’t known this, they would have cut into my abdomen to harvest autologous costal cartilage, then not been able to use it and just closed me back up.. I would’ve just become someone who had their abdomen cut open Honestly, from the moment they said I needed costal cartilage, I wanted autologous costal cartilage rather than donated costal cartilage because they said it has a lower absorption rate.. But in my case, my body just couldn’t support that ^^ Since it was my fate to use donated costal cartilage, I said I’d use donated costal cartilage.. Instead, to prevent absorption and the nasal tip dropping, they used 2 pieces of donated costal cartilage, and with the future in mind, they designed it with the height slightly higher too. When I had it done, I also had osteotomy for my hump nose, and the step-off disappeared cleanly, so I think I’m glad I did it. You should expect swelling through weeks 2~3. It’s literally surgery, so there’s absolutely no way there can be zero swelling from the start. When I occasionally see people say they had no swelling from the beginning, it seems like a lie lol And after surgery, I was worried my philtrum might look longer, but looking at the side view, my nasal tip isn’t upturned, and the front looks natural too, so I’m relieved haha!! During surgery, the splint and cotton were all uncomfortable (the real deal is suture removal lol), but I’m still so satisfied that even if I went back to the past, I think I’d do it again!!!! That’s how much I like it. When you go for a consultation, the hospital that makes you think, this is the place!! isn’t just one that tells you only the things you generally already know, but one that points out things you didn’t know, things that are hard to know from a patient’s perspective, before you even ask, I think! I hope everyone here makes a wise choice and has a successful surgery~
This review is a surgery review that pursues a natural look.