Breast Uplift – Mr. Adrian Richards of Aurora Clinics talks about how a Breast Uplift procedure is carried out. A breast uplift is an operation to lift and re-shape sagging breasts, giving a firmer, more youthful-looking bust line. A breast Lift can not make small breasts larger or reduce large breasts. See breast enlargement or breast reduction to correct. Your surgeon will remove some of the skin from underneath your breast. Your nipple will be moved into a higher position to create a firmer shape and more pert profile. The operation will take between 1 and 2 hours to complete. For more information on a breast uplift please contact Aurora Clinics on 01844 214262.

Breast Uplift

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon, and today I’m going to be talking a little bit about the recovery from a mastopexy or breast uplift procedure.

So, during your consultation with the surgeon, it may be me, we’ll have talked a little bit about the type of mastopexy that was going to be done. We’ve talked about the types of scarring in separate videos. So you should be really quite clear about the likely scarring or techniques going to be used.

Approximately a week before the operation, one of our nurses will be in contact with you to go over a health questionnaire, make sure you’re feeling healthy for the operation, and sometimes they may, if you’ve got a pre-existing medical condition, they may actually call you in to do heart tracings and blood tests just to make sure that the operation is as safe as possible for you. We’ll also ring you around that time, although you’ll know the date of the operation, we like to sort of fine tune it and bring you in two to three hours before the operation. So if your operation is going to be first thing in the morning, often we may bring you in the night before or just say if you come in first thing in the morning. If it’s slightly later in the day, we’ll bring you in later in the morning so you don’t have to be in first thing. We’ll also give you instructions on fasting. As you know, it’s important to have an empty stomach when you have the operation. And if there’s food it takes longer to go through the stomach, we like you not to have had anything to eat for six hours before the option. Fluid wise, we like that to be at least two hours for clear fluids. So water and clear fluids go through the stomach much faster than non-clear fluids. So cloudy fluids, any orange juice with speckles in it, anything that isn’t absolutely clear, you can’t drink for six hours before the operation, but clear fluids you can a little bit nearer. But we’ll go through that with you.

Important in the week before the operation, we like you to refrain from using some medications, and these include any non-steroidal medications like aspirin, Nurofen, Voltarol because they thin the blood and they can increase the risk of bleeding. So please stop those for at least a week before surgery. If you’re a smoker, it’s very important to stop smoking two weeks before the operation as smoking can interfere with the blood supply to the skin and delay healing. There are some homeopathic tablets which we also don’t like you to take because, again, these can thin the blood, increase the risk of bleeding during the operation, and these include St. John’s wart, gingko, and vitamin E. Homeopathic arnicas fine, but don’t take any non-homeopathic arnica during that time.

So the other points when you come in, a bit of preparation, is please don’t use any body ointment all over the breast area because this interferes with our antiseptic lotions we put on. Also, if you could just keep off the nail polish because we do monitor your blood saturation through your nails, so no nail polish or else we’ll have remove it. Another tip is just if you don’t want wear those horrible hospital baggy pants, just bring in some cotton underwear. If it’s anything synthetic, nylon, or any synthetic substances, it can interfere with some of our diathermy machinery, so we would have to remove it. But cotton underwear is fine.

So you come to hospital, you’ll be met at the reception by one of the staff who’ll bring you to your room and introduce you to your nurse. Your nurse will then do your blood pressure, ask you questions about your general health, and do your observations, your temperature, pulse, all those sorts of tests. Then you’ll see either myself or my anaesthetist. I’ve worked with my anaesthetist for a number of years, and we’ve got a very close working relationship which I think has been very beneficial to get the best possible care when you work very closely as a team.

So you’ll see me. I’ll draw on you, take photographs if you haven’t done them, and when I’m drawing, I’m marking exactly what the plan is. It’s very important to do the marking with you standing up because that’s when you get the gravity effects on the breast and also you’re going to be lying down in the operation. Although we do sit you up, it’s best to do the markings with you sitting up vertical.

Then you’ll see my anaesthetist who will go through what’s her plan for the operation, and often she’ll discuss a technique called interpleural block where she’ll numb the whole chest up by two small injections in the side and that will reduce your pain in the postoperative period and make it much more comfortable for you. We’ll also give you a small premed, which is a tablet to relax you and normally put some numbing cream on the back of your hand.

So then you go down to the operation. You’ll have a small cannula placed in the skin that’s already been numbed, so you shouldn’t really feel that, and then you drift slowly off to sleep. The operation takes about two hours, but you’ll wake up and you’ll probably be aware at first about three hours afterwards, probably in recovery which is the ward we keep you in after the operation.

Dressings wise all you’ll have is brown tape on the scars and a surgical bra. We don’t use big bulky dressings anymore. So it’s really just a bra dressing and we may use a drain. In about 50% of the cases we use a drain, 50% we don’t, and that would be explained to you before the operation.

So then you’ll go back to the ward. You should be completely pain free. You shouldn’t feel sick. Feeling sick after an operation is really rare now. With modern anaesthetics, you really shouldn’t feel nauseous at all, and you should feel comfortable. You shouldn’t feel in pain. Mastopexy is uncomfortable, but it’s not really that painful an operation.

So normally, we like you to rest that day. The following day if you’ve got a drain, we’ll remove that. The nurses will remove that, but we like you to get up and mobile. We will have had calf stimulators on your legs overnight really massaging the calves to make sure the blood supply is maintained and reduce the risk of any blood clots. Then we like you to get up and about the next day, and you can either go home that night or the night after. This all within a package that is the same cost whether you go home the day after or the day after that. So if you came in on a Monday, you could either go home on the Tuesday night or Wednesday, and it’s not like a hotel, there’s no checking out time. We’ll make sure that everything’s fine and you can go home, and you’ll be given an appointment to see us a week later. So that’s a week following your operation.

Now, in that week, if you’re at all worried at home, all you need to do is pick up the phone and we’ll be there to answer any queries. It’s important to refrain from any strenuous activity, anything that causes your blood pressure to go up during that time. So any bending down, housework is out for that week. We don’t like you driving for that week. You need to give your body the best chance to heal during that week.

Then, we’ll see you in a week in our dressings clinic. The nurses will take off the tape. It’s brown Micropore tape we take off, and then all the stitches used are absorbable, but the ends just need trimming. So the stitches don’t need removing. The ends just need trimming, and then we reapply the Micropore tape and the bra because we like to keep the scars supported for six weeks following the operation with Micropore as that gives you the best scarring long term.

Just a little tip about bras, it’s good to go to the Marks & Spencer or a bra manufacturer and get a bra to change into in that one week period, and what we normally recommend is the Marks & Spencer total support bra. Get a couple of them, normally C/D cups, with pretty much the same, if you’re a 34 before get the 34 afterwards or a 36. Get a variety, keep the labels on, and then we can see which one fits you best and you can return the other ones. But the important thing about your bra, it probably shouldn’t be a sports bra because a sports bra tends to compress. We use more gentle support, and everything must be quite elastic almost like a maternity bra is good because it will support you without constricting you and keep your comfortable.

Then we normally see you at second week. Then we like to see you always at six weeks following the operation, and that’s the time we take your postoperative photographs and we can give you the before and after photographs, a copy of those if you’d like, at that stage. Then the scars will be slightly red, raised at that stage. Scars do go through a red phase, red and raised. After the six weeks, we like you to massage Bio-Oil, which is a scar oil into the scars in an effort to encourage them to soften and fade more quickly, and then scars will normally fade over the months following surgery. So by a year following surgery, they’ve gone to a silvery colour.

But again, if you’re worried about any of these topics during your recovery, all you need to do is get on the phone to us and we’ll arrange for you to be seen by either our nurses or a surgeon. So I hope that’s clarified some aspects about recovery from mastopexy, and we look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks.