A man wakes up one sunny morning.
He rubs the sleep from his dewy eyes, and remembers.
Today is the day he will finally break his legs.
Not only will he break his legs, he’ll pay $100,000 to do it.
His whole life he’s lived as a short man—constantly overlooked
at the bar, taller guys getting served before him, and on
numerous occasions, after mustering up the courage to finally
ask out the girls he liked, they turned him down outright, saying
they wouldn’t feel feminine next to a guy shorter than them.
But today is the day.
He double checks the appointment on his phone, and texts his
sister to let her know where to meet him before his surgery.
She still thinks it’s a silly thing to spend 100
thousand dollars on, but she supports him regardless.
Now, in just months, he’ll finally have what he’s always wanted.
He’ll finally be treated the way he deserves.
He believes he’ll finally have a “normal” life, like everyone else.
It’s hard to be short, genuinely.
From reaching the top shelf at the grocery store, to being
unable to touch your feet to the ground when you sit in at
restaurants, not to mention concerts are mostly just staring
at someone’s back, it can be a real source of frustration.
Not to mention the low grade simmer of
discrimination that still pervades modern society.
The average height of the American man is 5 foot 9, and every inch
less than that can have effects socially, as well as materially.
According to a 2009 Australian study, shorter men make, on
average, about 500$ less per inch than their taller counterparts.
Not only that, but the average height
of male Fortune 500 CEOs is 6 feet.
For these reasons and more, it’s becoming increasingly common
for men to undergo invasive limb lengthening surgeries.
If you’re on the shorter side, and you’re thinking “oh
man, I would love to be taller!” don’t get too excited yet.
In order to get at least 3 inches taller, you’re looking at a
price tag in the ballpark of 75,000 dollars to extend your femurs.
If you want another 3 inches on top of that, expect to pay
upwards of 150,000 dollars to do your femur and your tibias.
If you don’t believe me, let’s talk about Alan, a 23 year
old software engineer from Chicago—that’s not his real
name—He was about 5 foot 6, and never thought he was short
until a girl he had a crush on “roasted” him for it he said.
Being rejected for something he couldn’t change rooted
an insecurity in him so deep that he was willing to
have his femurs lengthened 3 entire inches to climb out.
Alan isn’t the only one.
There’s also Bryan, an attractive 27 year old Chinese-American,
formerly just below 5 foot 7, who wanted to improve
his “batting average” with women, and is now 5 foot 10.
As well as Chad, a hitherto 5 foot 5 CFO, who, after
learning his partner was embarrassed to be taller
than him, underwent the surgery to grow to 5 foot 8.
Limb lengthening surgery is a real and
sought after procedure, but how does it work?
Like many other cosmetic surgeries, limb lengthening
started off as a procedure to treat more dire complications.
The surgery was developed in the 50s by Soviet
scientist Gavriil Ilizarov, to treat bone fractures
and malformations, like limb discrepancies.
It’s often performed on children during their growth to do as much
as nudge bones in the right direction if they’ve taken a wrong turn.
His Ilizarov frame, was the first generation
of the devices that we continue to use today.
Looking like a tube shaped metal scaffolding, the
frame sits around your limb and uses pins driven
though the flesh into the bone to hold it in place.
Then, over time, the frame wrenches the bones
apart until new bone tissue fills the space.
The Ilizarov frame drove pins through the skin and muscle
and finally into the bones, leaving open sores, but nowadays,
many clinics use nails that are inserted directly into the
bone, which avoid the open sores that could become infected.
The process uses our body’s natural ability to grow
more bone to lengthen the bone over the course of
3 stages, surgery, distraction, and consolidation.
The first stage, surgery, consists of breaking the limb in question.
A surgeon will cut the bone with care, ensuring that blood flow remains
as well as maintaining the other processes that aid in bone growth.
Surgeons will either cut into the tibia, or the femur
depending on the situation and how much height you want to add.
Typically, you can get 3 inches from your femurs,
costing about 75 thousand dollars, and you can get an
additional 3 if you also do your tibias as well, coming
to about 155 thousand dollars for the entire procedure.
After the bone has been separated, the surgeon will then
attach a lengthening device like the Ilizarov apparatus
or an internal telescoping rod that will eventually
stretch the top portion of the limb from the bottom.
This step requires about a week to 10 days of
recovery before the lengthening can begin in earnest.
In the second stage, distraction, surgeons will slowly,
and I mean slowly, pull each portion of the bone away from the other,
so that new bone can grow in between them.
This step takes about 2 months, and while the lengthening
will begin in a hospital with a doctor,
the patient or their caretakers will be taught
how to lengthen the bone at home.
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Limbs are most often lengthened at a rate of about a
millimetre a day, and how long the process takes is
determined by how much extra length you want to add.
For example, if you want to add 50 millimetres, aka 5
centimetres or 2 inches, then that would take about 50 days.
Medical teams will schedule checkups with you to monitor the bone,
muscles, nerves, and other tissues carefully during this step so
if they spot any complications, they can address them immediately.
If your joints become stiff, or if doctors spot any damage, they
might temporarily stop or slow down the lengthening process.
The final stage is the consolidation, or the healing stage.
This takes place after the limb reaches the length
determined by the surgeons and patient before surgery.
In this time, the bone, muscle, nerves, tendons,
ligaments and all the other fun meaty parts grow
into the space and adjust around the new growth.
In terms of how long you can expect to sit around healing, it
usually takes about twice as long as the lengthening stage.
50mm takes 50 days to stretch, and 100 days to heal, and so forth.
It should also be noted that physical therapy is crucial throughout the
stretching and healing process, otherwise you could lose some mobility.
You should also refrain from putting any weight
you don’t have to on the limb in question.
Dr Kevin Debiparshad— or as his patients call him, Dr D of the
LimbplastX Institute, says that “I always tell patients that
when they stop lengthening, that’s when they get into trouble.
Because they feel good.
They got their new height and they have no pain.
They get impatient.”
One of Dr D’s patients, a man going by “John”, had to be
chided for walking around on his legs without crutches.
Even though his healing process was coming to an end, Dr D said
that since the bone was still forming, he’s incredibly vulnerable.
If he were to fall or damage the screws in his legs
even a little, they would have to go back into surgery
and start the healing process over from the beginning.
That’s months upon months of wheelchair-laden, rehab-attending,
pain-filled day to day you can risk going back to if you’re not careful.
Not to mention none of it is free.
I can’t say for sure what the cost would be, but
remember the whole process costs at least 70 grand,
so going back into surgery isn’t gonna be cheap.
When GQ articles editor, Chris Gayomali, found out
about leg lengthening, it was in a Google search.
“How to grow taller as an adult?” didn’t bring many
answers, but it did remind him of the times his
height impeded his ability to participate in things.
At 5 foot 6, he mentions that he wasn’t able to make the basketball
team, he’s still unable to reach the Instant Pot in the top
cupboard, and he was even rejected by a taller girl he liked.
When Chris and his wife first started dating, he made a joke.
He said “If I was taller we’d probably be together already”, implying
that she would have liked him more if they were the same height.
Chris continues, saying that “there’s always a part of us that feels
like a physically incomplete version of who we were supposed to be.
You, but at 90 percent scale.”
Chris thought about undergoing the surgery, but he said
that after talking with his wife “eventually, I came around
to the fact we could be 80 years old and still together.
And at that point, we’d just be hunched over, wrinkly, droopy.
Having that longer-term perspective…it was easy.”
For Chris, taking a look to the future with his wife
was what he needed to feel better about his height.
Of course, he’s still going to have to deal with pulling over a chair
to grab anything from the top cupboard, but having relationships with
people who love and respect him is enough to deal with any social
stigmas that might come along with his short stature, but for some,
that’s not enough, and they need to literally, step up the game.
It should be said too that it's not just short
men who get the proverbial short end of the stick.
According to a 2013 study in the Netherlands, only 7.5% of heterosexual
relationships were between a shorter man and a taller woman.
This means two things, heterosexual men generally go for
women that are shorter than them, and vice versa, heterosexual
women generally go for men who are taller than them.
But this fact rears its ugly empirically studied head in many ways.
Alan, Bryan, and Chad were “roasted” for being shorter than
their female partners, but I really want to make sure that
we also recognize that tall women are often “roasted” too.
USA Today writer Hannah Yasharoff, discussing Netflix original movie
“Tall Girl 2” a story of a 6 foot 3 girl who falls in love with her
short best friend, says that in her experience, men “often vocalise
their discomfort with dating a taller woman.” Not only that, but
“the men Jackson meets off dating apps round up their height and are
then surprised or upset when she ends up being taller than them.”
Lie and say you’re taller than you really are, and then get angry
at a woman for not being shorter than you, make sense fellas.
The point being, that society expects men and women to look certain
ways, but, as we can see, not everyone fits into those expectations.
Now, we all have the right to be able to make ourselves look the way
we want to look, but when it comes to cosmetic surgeries, people have
all sorts of opinions about when it’s acceptable to change your body.
Not all of us are living with the same bodies, and what body
we live in affects how we are able to engage with the world.
A short woman is treated differently than a short
man, or a tall woman, or a tall man for that matter.
Dr D jokingly said that he could own a tech company
with the number of computer engineers and Silicon
Valley programmers that come into his office.
He has clients from Google, Amazon,
Facebook, and Microsoft among others.
However, social stigma isn’t the only reason why people
are choosing to go under the knife for a handful of inches.
There are individuals born with disabilities that impact their
quality of life, like Kristen DeAndrade, a Floridian born
with achondroplasia dwarfism, a disorder of bone growth that
prevents the changing of cartilage, but it also affects height.
Kristen started her procedures in June 1998 when she was 12 years old.
At her natural height, many daily tasks and chores
were nigh impossible for her to do without supports.
In an interview about her condition, she said
“I struggled to navigate through public places.
Toilets were too high, and I couldn’t reach light switches.
My school had to adapt everything for me, I had my own
table with little boxes to help me get up to my chair.”
Over the next 4 years, Kristen underwent back to back
regular surgeries slowly stretching out her limbs.
They started with her lower legs, the
tibias, stretching them out 6 inches.
Then, they moved onto her upper legs, her femurs until she went from a
measly 3 foot 9, to a towering 4 foot 11, an increase of over 14 inches.
However, not everyone is as enthused as Kristen
was about her sudden increase in height.
She says that "There are some people in the dwarfism
community who claim it to be cosmetic surgery.
They have said that I should love my body for who I am and
that I should be ashamed for wanting to be like everyone else."
It is true, in a way.
You should love your body, but when it comes to restoring or
increasing ability for individuals who have become disabled, or born
disabled, it can be a gateway to living a more independent life.
Kristen said that for her, “the surgery was my view
into the future … A future of being independent and the
ability to navigate an average-sized world free of pain.”
And there’s also something to be said of Chris,
who remains a short person, but thanks to a support
system, doesn’t need to be physically taller.
For some of us struggling with being treated differently because
of our bodies, therapy can be a massive help, and as a bonus, it’s
pennies next to the cost of having your femurs broken and yanked apart.
What I find most interesting is that Dr D has also performed
limb lengthening surgeries for trans men, to help them with
gender dysphoria or just to simply pass as cis more easily.
He also notes that he’s even performed limb
shortening for trans women for the opposite reason.
I’m reminded of what Chris said about short guys, “there’s always
a part of us that feels like a physically incomplete version of who
we were supposed to be”, because, in a way, all of Dr D’s clients
are asking for surgeries in order to affirm their identities.
“Men” feel like they’re supposed to be tall and powerful,
“women” are short and dainty, and the gendered expectations that
come with those identities impact cis and trans people alike.
In the end, you have the right to do what you want with your body.
I just want to make sure that you know that you’re
perfect just the way you are… But, if you do yearn
for taller shores, then I say to you: “Break a leg!”
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