* Video sent before surgery - No room for misunderstanding
In March of 2001, just one month before my surgery, I sent Dr. Eppley a 3 minute video of myself simulating the facelift effect I sought by lifting with thumbs and forefingers, the areas just below and behind the earlobes at the angle of the jaw and preauricular area in line with the eye. This “lifting” with my fingers in an UPWARD, vertical or cephalid vector, produced the desired effect on the lower face, in particular, the platysma, and lifted the severe laxity from the previous surgery, accentuating my normally high hyoid position. My neck has always been long and slender, and until the first signs of platysmal banding appeared in my last 40’s, I always had a well defined cervicomental angle.
Sent to Dr. before surgery from Losing Face on Vimeo.
(Had I read Dr. Eppley’’s consultation notes BEFORE my operation, I would have known he was just paying lip service in claiming to understand the soft tissue changes and how the revision surgery should be done. A genius level IQ is not required to analyze the photos, video and diagrams sent to him regarding surgical technique to understand why the platysma had to be transected and tailored as I described in detail. It only requires a basic knowledge of geometry, which every plastic surgeon hopefully has. Anyone with an eye for spatial relation can understand why NOT releasing the tension on the platysma with a transverse cuts would prevent neck extension and jaw closure. Nine years of extreme tension “gridlocked” into a thin muscle sheath already stiff and hypoelastic from the rhinoplasty will gradually tear, losing its function as a “containing sleeve” of support to the deep structures in the neck.. Thus, the support to the internal structures which allow normal functions of breathing, swallowing and normal mobility progressively weakens, compromising functions which literally sustain life.
Any surgeon who claims he does not understand what I have described in exhaustive detail, in my opinion, is intentionally denying the evident or should change professions.
The lifting with forefingers in the preauricular area created a bunching of skin at the outer aspect of the eye, and correcting this would involve an extended lower blepharoplasty incision, which Dr. X and I discussed during our meeting in February, 2001. Remember, I flew out to meet with him BEFORE sending this video, the purpose of which was to further clarify the goals of the operation and make certain we were both “on the same page”, to use one of his favorite expressions.
I think it is evident that I am not placing an inordinate amount of tension on my face, however, I AM LIFTING UPWARD, which I rightly expected Dr. X to do in my operation.
The post op pictures are also stills taken from a video, and show the cervicomental angle as MORE OBTUSE, not improved. Dr. Eppley actually SHORTENED the platysma and pulled the SMAS in a vector lateral and caudal (down). The sagging skin in my pre-op photos, but was actually laxity of both skin AND SMAS, which was “blown out” by the excessive swelling after the rhinoplasty, in which edema tracked along the path of least resistance, i.e., the insufficiently healed facelift dissection planes.
Aside from the obviously “thicker” neck and the pulling down and back of my jaw from the inappropriate vector of tension in Dr. Eppley’s face “lift” (?), nearly 2 years after this surgery, his extreme over-excision of tissue did not leave enough to me to lift my chin, close my jaw or extend my neck.
If, as his e-mail response regarding this video indicates, he did, indeed, understand the necessity for lifting the skin and SMAS in APPROPRIATE vectors of tension, why did he do something so predictably injurious and INAPPROPRIATE as this?
His operative report states that I never had a previous platysma plication, yet he went in through the OLD INCISION from Dr. Driscoll’s platysma plication and had a copy of this op report. This is only one error in a long list of Dr. Eppley’s thoughtless act which resulted in changing an aesthetic problem with good chance for correction, to an irreversible surgical disaster that has left me suffering excruciating pain every day since the day her operated on me, inability to have any kind of normal facial animation whatsoever, turning an already strange visage into physically painful and grotesque contortions with the slightest facial expression. Hearing loss, tinnitus,.. The operation by Dr. Eppley makes what happened at MGH seem like a picnic in comparison.
Stumble It!
