Mr Richards discusses the best way to prepare for your Breast Reduction surgical procedure. He describes what will happen on the day of surgery and what to expect when you wake up after your breast Reduction procedure. For more information or should you wish to book a FREE Consultation with our specialist plastic surgeon, please call us on 01844 214362.

Breast Reduction 3

What to Expect on Your Op Day

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon and the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics based here in the United Kingdom. In this video, I’m going to be continuing out theme of breast reduction videos. I previously talked about who is suitable and the techniques that can be used. Now, I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s actually involved, the nitty-gritty, so to speak.

The first thing is you normally have a pre-operative assessment about a week before surgery. They will get you in, do a heart tracing, blood test, and just make sure you’re generally fit and healthy. Then a week later you have your operation, and you will come in normally on the day of surgery. If it’s me doing the surgery, I’ll come and see you. We’ll take photos and I’ll draw on your breasts. So it’s important that’s done with you sitting upright because the markings change slightly as you lie down. When you’re having your operation, you’ll be lying down. So I’ll spend about ten minutes doing the markings, and that’s really marking where the nipple is going to go to and which bit of tissue I’m going to remove. I’ll answer any questions you’ve got at that time and we can go through any issues you’ve got.

The anaesthetist will come and see you. I’ve worked with the same anaesthetist for a long time. She’s a lady and she will talk to you about her aspect of the anaesthesia and in particular if she is going to numb the chest area up with local anaesthetic. They sometimes use a technique called intrapleural blocks which essentially makes the whole area pain free for about 12 hours following surgery and reduces the amount of anaesthetic drugs they give you. So you’re much less likely to be sick after the operation.

So then you go to the operating theatre. You won’t know much about it for a couple of hours. The operation takes a couple of hours. You probably won’t be aware of much. You’ll be sleepy for the first hour after you come out of the operating theatre. When you come out of the operating theatre, you have a bra on which we fit in the theatre. You have brown tape on the incisions, so brown Micropore tape over the absorbable stitches. Normally, we don’t use a drain. Some surgeons use drains. I prefer not to because they’re painful and a source of infection. Then you’ll be hopefully pretty pain free for that day. We give you painkillers if you need them. You shouldn’t really be sick, and then we encourage you to eat and drink really quite soon after the operation. Mobilise, go to the loo on the day of surgery because that sort of keeps the blood flow going to your legs.

Okay. So that’s really the day of surgery. In the next video, I’ll talk subsequent days following surgery.

Thank you.