When you step into the operating room for surgery, you never know what is going to happen. You have been told important facts about the procedure and have followed the doctor’s advice concerning the preparation for surgery. On the other hand, the doctor has taken the necessary precautions and chosen the type of anaesthesia that better fits your needs and things may seem under control.
What happens during revision rhinoplasty?
However, there is always a risk with plastic surgery and it is not about the reaction of the patient’s body to the anaesthetic or medication applied before and during the procedure; it stands in the outcome of the operation. In some cases, the new shape of the patient’s nose may not be what he/she has expected and even the doctor may be surprised at the result. Also, if the nose job was done for functional reasons only, the procedure may not have solved the patient’s respiratory problem. What is there to do in such cases?
Like any other surgical procedure, rhinoplasty may have to be performed again. This new operation is known as revision or secondary rhinoplasty. Primary rhinoplasty and revision rhinoplasty are very much alike. The difference between them stands in their purpose. While the first procedure was done to mend the patient’s nose from a functional or aesthetical point of view, revision rhinoplasty is meant to repair what the initial operation could not.
The steps of revision rhinoplasty are identical to those of the initial one. The patient will be given a local anaesthetic and sedative or general anaesthesia as the case may be. Since revision rhinoplasty tends to take more time to complete than the previous operation, general anaesthesia is preferred by most surgeons.
According to the seriousness of this revision procedure, the doctor may choose to perform either closed or open rhinoplasty. The former is appropriate when the surgeon has to operate on cartilages but if there is a more delicate problem and the patient needs alterations to the nasal bone, open rhinoplasty will offer better exposure and, most likely, better results.
As soon as he has made the incisions, the surgeon will separate the skin of the nose from the underlying nose structure. What happens next depends upon the particular case. Sometimes the cartilage needs to be repositioned, some other times parts of the structures are missing and they need to be replaced. The surgeon may as well work on the nasal bone and reshape it so that irregularities of its structure are eliminated. Afterwards, the skin is redraped and the incisions are closed.
Revision rhinoplasty is said to involve less pain and bruising than primary rhinoplasty which makes the idea of undergoing such an operation less annoying for the patient. The splint and stitches are removed during the following week and the appearance of the nose also improves in the months to come as swelling starts fading away. Within a week, the patient may resume work, avoiding any kind of activity that might jeopardise his/her nose. Exposing to sunrays should also be avoided for at least two months.
The bad news about revision rhinoplasty is the possibility that another operation be necessary after a while. If the patient was not satisfied with the results of the initial operation, he may find that those of the second one are again different from what he has expected. In this case a third operation may follow and so on. There are patients who have had several unsuccessful nasal surgeries, some of them even five or six, so there is always the risk of having a new one.