Thank you for your question.
You're asking if it's possible to have eyelid surgery without general anaesthesia, and you
state in your question that your eyelids are floppy, and that you also have vision issues.
You also state that your prescription is -3 for both eyes.
Well, I can certainly help you with that.
I'm a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and a Fellowship-trained oculoplastic or oculofacial
plastic surgeon, which means that my first area of training was in eye surgery, before
advanced training in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery of the eyelids.
In addition, I've been practicing in Long Island and Manhattan for over 20 years.
I can certainly tell you that it is very much possible to have eyelid surgery without general
anaesthesia.
This was one of the things that I really advocated from an early stage in my career over 20 years
ago, and it has always been my observation, and this is a controversial issue, that in
the field of cosmetic surgery, many of the challenges with patience experience and recovery
had more to do with anaesthesia than it had to do with the actual surgery.
So, what I developed over this time frame has been a system where we routinely perform
cosmetic upper and lower eyelid surgery, face lifting surgery, liposuction, breast augmentation,
hair transplants, all under local anaesthesia with light sedation.
So in terms of eyelid surgery, what we do for our patients routinely is, and just to
describe what our patients experiences are like, is we have our own Joint Commission-approved
facilities in our offices, in both Manhattan and Long Island.
What this means is what we've done is replicate the standards, or utilize the standards, of
safety used for hospitals and surgery centers, and created facilities where we have everything
as if we were in a hospital.
Eyelid surgery is actually very straightforward.
Performing it under local anaesthesia or local sedation is not that difficult in the hands
of someone with a lot of experience and facility in doing the procedure.
So it is routine for our practice, for our patients, to do upper eyelid surgery such
as what would be indicated for you in this type of situation.
We don't do general anaesthesia for this, and we have the facilities.
We kind of have the best of all worlds in doing that.
I would also add that recovery is considerably faster this way.
The reason for this is that when people have general anaesthesia, they basically often
wake up coughing or they may be nauseous from the medications.
With local sedation, that really doesn't happen very much at all.
We don't use opioids in our practice for sedation—we don't really feel that we need to.
It’s available if we have to, but really it's been many years since we've had to use
these, and these are the drugs that are like fentanyl, Demerol, codeine—these are associated
with post-operative nausea and vomiting.
So by eliminating the opioids altogether, there's been no problem.
So, to answer your question, the answer is yes, it is possible, and that the results
can be very nice and the recovery can be much easier.
So with that being said, I would recommend that you meet with qualified and experienced
cosmetic surgeons who are comfortable with performing the surgery this way, and find
someone you're comfortable with, that you like the results in terms of before and after
pictures.
And it's very important in my opinion that people really feel comfortable with their
doctor, and that they feel like the doctor gets what they want.
As a specialist, I do revision eyelid surgery for patients around the world, and very often
I feel like there's a disconnect between what the patient wants and what the doctor believes
they want.
It just takes time to develop this type of rapport and have this clarity of communication.
So I hope that was helpful and I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for your question.