Tummy tucks otherwise known as Abdominoplasty. There have been all kinds of stuff written up in literature and if you go online and you’re online and looking at me you’ll read about different tucks. Lipoabdominalplasty and vaser and all kinds of different things. Tummy tucks basically are done by taking the excess skin off the lower abdomen. Elevating the upper abdominal skin, sewing up the abdominal muscles and then pulling down the excess skin. You’ll have a scar that’s low and transverse along your lower abdomen just above the pubis area and then we bring the belly button back through for a nice little incision.
Tummy tucks in my practice are about an hour and a half to two hour operation is done in my fully accredited surgery center. You’re up and walking the next day. In fact you’re up and walking that night. My patients typically walk in to see me the next day or two days later and they are standing almost upright. Not a lot of pain, in fact, lately we’ve been injecting this special medicine in the abdominal wall that last for three days. There’s no pain pump and it’s very comfortable. I do use drains and there are some people that talked about doing Abdominoplasty without drains. I tried that for a while. Aesthetically I don’t like the result.
Often times we’ll do a little bit of liposuction in the hips to make it all blend very nicely. Often times we’ll do a little sculpting of the tissues underneath the skin to give a little bit more of the natural crease down in the middle or a little bit of a furrow to make it look more natural. Patients that want a tummy tuck, are patients that have had a few babies or patients that have lost a lot of weight. Patients that have a gastric bypass or lap band often will have lost 75 or 100 or 150 pounds and we have to do a tummy tuck on them. Sometimes we have to do what is called a complex tummy tuck where there’s so much skin maybe there’s a mid-line scar as well as the transverse scar. The routine tummy tuck is a transverse scar.
Recently I published in one of our national journals our or my experience with over 300 consecutive out-patient Abdominoplasty procedures. We had no major complications. What that paper showed, and we’re happy to refer you to copies of that article or you can go to our website and find it, was that — if you do patients Abdominoplasty as an out-patient, not kept overnight, those patients do much better. They are up walking faster, they have no incidents of clots in the legs or the lungs and very few if any chance of infection or other major complications. We think it’s a better way to go. It’s a way that a lot of people are doing it these days and ages — but we’ve been doing it that way for about 15 years getting great results.
It’s a very happy operation. Trims up your torso, looks great, makes you feel better about how you look and your pants will fit better.
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