Functional Rhinoplasty
After a good 15 years of hating the large dorsal hump on the bridge of my nose and constantly feeling like I cold t breathe out of my nose properly despite taking every medication under the sun…I decided to seek out a dual certified ENT and facial plastic surgeon.
My search gave me 3 doctors, the first seemed to not care much about my cosmetic concerns. The second blew me off because “everyone has a deviated septum” and said I’d find no relief in a septoplasty turbinate reduction, so all my hope fell on the final doctor, Dr. Pero.
Upon walking into the room where I was to wait for him I was already impressed. It was the same room I’d been in when my own ENT told me about my deviated septum and enlarged turbinates. This was obviously a very ENT-focused center. Of course when I met Dr. Pero and we began talking he didn’t brush off any of my concerns, both functional or cosmetic, and took time to look inside my nose, go over my MRI scans of my nasal passages, and he even took photos of my profile so we could play with what I wanted my nose to look like.
I knew he was the doctor for me almost immediately. The surgery was booked that day.
We had one more consultation a week prior to surgery to ensure we were on the same page. No nerves whatsoever, I had complete faith in him.
The surgery itself took about 3.5 hours, and I was in the recovery room for about another 3 hours. My nose didn’t necessarily hurt but the incision site under my columella throbbed like a b****. This lasted for the next week, I went to town on those hydros. It was a lot more painful than I had read from other people.
Almost immediately though I could tell my breathing had improved. I did have lots of mucus that plagued me day 2-3 and was constantly rinsing my nose and cleaning it with cotton swabs. Sleeping sitting up was TERRIBLE and I woke up every 3 hours with my stitches throbbing.
Getting the splints out was easy (and gross), as was taking off the cast. Removing the stitches was actual hell.
I’m about 4-5 weeks post op now and I have never breathed better and never felt better about my nose. Even though I know it’s swollen to all hell, it looks fantastic. It’s still sore to the touch with my tip being very stiff and numb. My incision site is healing really well and pretty much all the dissolvable stitches have come out. I don’t hate what I see when I look in the morning now, Dr. Pero gave me the nose I should have always had and I can’t thank him enough for that.
Dr. Pero is a great surgeon and ENT who listens to ALL of your concerns and will treat you as if you’d already booked your surgery with him on your first consultation. Good attention to detail and very kind. My functional rhinoplasty went amazingly and I love my new nose.