What is Recovery Like When Moving Breast Implants from Above to Below the Pectoralis Muscle?
Video transcript:
Hi I’m Larry Schlesinger and I’m a board certified plastic surgeon from Honolulu, Hawaii. And the question of the day is – What’s the recovery after moving from above the muscle to below the muscle?
Again, this is a trick question. When you’re implants in the pocket above the muscle, there’s always scar tissue around it whether it’s a thin fine scar or a thick scar that causes capsular contracture. At any rate, you need to go in, always from a periareolar, just around the areola, go in, take out all the capsule…and the reason for that is you want the breast tissue and the top of the pectoralis muscle to fuse. So you want to obliterate the space above the pectoralis muscle. And so that’s the first step.
Then, what I do, doesn’t have to be what everybody does, but what I do is put a drain in that pocket. The drain is not going to really drain any fluid, it’s to suck the pectoralis to the breast tissue above and that comes out through the armpit.
The drains stay in for three days. Once the drains are out, I’d say it’s about five to seven days and of course the sutures come out around the areola at about six days. And then in this situation because you’ve got a periareolar incision you want to wear a bra. I normally don’t have patients wear bras because we come from the armpit and we’re subpectoral, etc. But in this situation, you’re going to want to wear a bra and you’re going to want to 24/7.
And that’s about how much time it is for recovery when it’s pocket switching. I’m Larry Schlesinger and I’m a board certified plastic surgeon from Honolulu, Hawaii. Aloha.
