S. Larry Schlesinger, MD, FACS, award-winning surgeon in Honolulu, Hawaii, answers common questions his patients have before breast augmentation surgery. In this video, he answers the question “How soon can I fly after breast augmentation surgery?”
Video transcript:
Hi, I’m Larry Schlesinger and I’m a board certified plastic surgeon. The question today is “How soon can I fly after a breast augmentation?” Well, this is my experience. My experience tells me that at least the first five days, you should stay on land. You should stay near your plastic surgeon to be sure there are no complications and everything has been taken care of.
For us at the Breast Implant Center of Hawaii, we remove the first row of stitches at three days, the second row of stitches at five days, and that’s from the armpit, that’s how we always put implants in. And then, at that point, should you want to fly to the mainland, you certainly can. There are a couple rules; number one, (these are kind of basic rules for any surgery), Don’t cross your legs, don’t cross your ankles because you’re in a hypercoagulable state and therefore you’ll increase the change of blood clots. Number two, we always give patients Prednisone, which is a corticosteroid because everybody swells on an airplane and we give you these steroids in order to see that you don’t swell probably at all and certainly not excessively because it would be uncomfortable and it slows the wound healing. But five days, in my experience, is just fine for flying to the mainland. However, flying inter-island in Hawaii, you can certainly fly within the next day. We do that all the time but we only go up to about 21 or 22,000 feet in Hawaii, where they go up to 45,000 feet when they fly from here to California.
I’m Larry Schlesinger, and I’m a board certified plastic surgeon and I want to thank you very much for listening to me. Aloha.