Any hope for my eyes?
Pics (I had asian eyelid surgery done twice) (Photo)
Hi, I can't go into details but basically I had bleph + ptosis repair done twice.
First surgery led to multiple complications.
Then the second surgery, one eye is smaller than the other and the fold feels very heavy,
like it's full of lead, whereas the other is light and feels natural.
I kind of feel hopeless because my right eye just feels so heavy and I don't know why,
or how a doctor can fix that heaviness.
I was thinking maybe scar tissue is weighing it down?
Thanks in advance
Thank you for your question!
In your question you described having to have two surgeries related to eyelid ptosis and
that at this point although it’s unclear how long it is from your last procedure, you’re
concerned about a heavy feeling in your eyelid and what to do about it.
Well, as a cosmetic oculofacial plastic surgeon, I can tell you in practicing for 20 years
that ptosis is one of those procedures which it can go beautifully well and you can do
a great job and everything looks fantastic and other cases, you can actually have to
do not just one but more than one revision surgery.
That being said, when you think about surgery to this very limited space, it can be understood
that the sense of heaviness is often the result of swelling intern that being internal swelling
or tissue swelling and it can also cause the eyelid to drop a little bit particularly if
there enough swelling that it causes a physical weight on the eyelid.
Sometimes we refer to this like mechanical ptosis where in cases of more obvious mechanical
ptosis, it can be actually lesion that is weighing down on the eyelid.
Swelling can cause drooping of the eyelid.
In addition, the healing process of the muscle, the levator muscle, can also take a little
bit of time so that the eyelid may come up a millimetre or so or half a millimetre and
get you closer to the symmetry.
I can just tell you about how we do our procedures in terms of ptosis surgery, when we do ptosis
surgery in our practice, to ensure the likelihood of success, in other words getting the proper
height, contour, shape, symmetry, during the surgery we actually sit the patient up and
we will look, of course our patient doesn’t feel any pain, they’re numb but they’re
alert enough that we can look at their eyelid and make adjustment sometimes while they are
sitting up to get as close as possible to the final result.
We statistically, close to a 100% of the time, probably 95% to 98% of the time, we’re able
predict that if it looks good during the procedure, it will look good after.
Of course, over a 20-year career, there are exceptions to that rule and you just have
to deal with if that happens.
From your perspective, I think that meeting with your doctor and discussing this feeling
of heaviness and your doctor examining you and giving you an idea of what to anticipate,
any surgical procedure regardless of location can take up to one year for full healing.
I have even seen with scars and other things that your further maturation beyond a year.
So when talking about this area with the delicate tissue of the eyelid which this tissue is
less than a half a millimetre in thickness, you can understand that a little swelling
can cause a lot of impact.
So you have probably some times to allow some time for adjustment.
When you have ptosis surgery, it’s usually due to some type of issue related to the muscle
called the levator muscle.
The world levator is like the world elevator.
That muscle may not move in the same way as the other eye and that take some time and
adaptation.
So there are factors here that probably contribute to that heavy feeling that you are so concerned
about.
So again my recommendation is that you meet with the doctor who did your surgery, discuss
this feeling, give the doctor the opportunity to examine you and see what can account for
this feeling and I suspect that through time, things will get better.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!