Richmond’s #1 Mommy Makeover Center

So the day of surgery you’ll be at the surgery center about an hour before we start, you’ll get all prepared by the nurses and anesthesiologists. I will stand you up and draw a few lines on your abdominal wall. Typically where we’re going to do the surgery. I’ll oftentimes put some circles on your hips or waist or other areas that we may be doing a little bit of liposuction. And so we’ll mark you before surgery.

You’ll have some devices placed on your legs called sequential hose that are stockings. And also we’ll have some devices called sequential compression devices, which squeeze your calves during surgery. And those will be continuously used throughout surgery and even in the recovery room until you go home. And then you’ll go home with the stockings.

A tummy tuck. We do all of these things because it has a higher risk of what’s called DVT, or deep venous thrombosis. And that in itself is a problem. But when that blood clot breaks free, it can go to your lungs or your pulmonary arteries and it’s called a pulmonary embolus. And that can be fatal. So one of the things we do for all our patients is we use those sequential devices and we also put them on a blood thinner. One is called Lovenox. It’s a shot you give once a day. The others called Xarelto, which is a pill you take once a day. And most of our patients take that for about seven days after surgery.

One of the things we like to do is evaluate our patients very quickly and every week. So we are going to see our patients every week for the first month after abdominoplasty. Because it really does have some significant downtime and patients have a lot of questions they need to have answered. And we want to be there for them every week to make sure they’re on the right track and everything’s moving in the right direction.