A ^Retired Plastic Surgeon's Notebook

Preoperative deflation of saline breast implants.

Seattle Plastic Surgeon discusses the rationale for purposefully deflating saline breast implants prior to implant removal or replacement.   Check out this recent case of mine.

Blog,   (20121009124134645) 20130607124509392Often it makes a lot of sense to deflate saline implants prior to replacing or removing them.  The case I present here shows a perfect candidate for preoperative deflation.

Her implants are old and the right one has developed a capsular contracture.  She wants the implants out and a breast lift so she won’t be saggy.  In her “before deflation” photo, it is apparent that she has a lot of asymmetry but it’s not apparent if this is just because of the implants.  I can remove the variable of the implants by deflating them.  Of course, this only works with saline implants.

“Immediately after deflation” (this is done in the exam room with a little local anesthesia and a needle and syringe), she looks really, really bad.   But…………………….

As you can see in the “3 weeks after deflation” photo, her skin has retracted a lot.   Absolutely no surgery was done.  This is exactly the same thing that happens to a most women’s abdomens after giving birth.  Immediately after deliver it’s really, really saggy but a few weeks later, not so bad.

She wanted to go ahead with the implant removal and also the breast lift.  She would have looked okay after removal without a lift but she wanted to be nice and perky and as you can see she is!  I do not think I could have achieved this result had I not done the preoperative deflation first.

This was a very, very happy ending for a patient who was terribly worried about how her breasts would look after she parted ways with her implants.

Thanks for reading and thank you to this lovely patient for her trust in me.   Dr. Lisa Lynn Sowder

 

 

 

 

Category: Breast Implant Removal, Breast Implants, Breast Lift | Tags: , , , , , , , ,

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