Greg:
Hey, this is Greg from Big Bay Mornings on 99.7 NOW, and I’m here with our resident certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Bae. Hey, Dr. Bae.
Dr. Bae:
Hey, Greg.
Greg:
You look like you just got out of surgery. What you been doing today?
Dr. Bae:
I just dressed up in scrubs so people think I’m a doctor.
Greg:
That’s good. Well, I hope you are a doctor because you have one of the, or you do one of the most popular procedures out there right now. It’s a mommy makeover but I hear that phrase all the time, but I don’t quite know everything that’s going on during a mommy makeover.
Definition of the Mommy Makeover
Dr. Bae:
Every doctor maybe has a little bit different definition of a mommy makeover, but I’ll definitely try to explain what I think is the common denominator for all doctors and a mommy maker just includes making you over, getting you back to your pre-pregnancy state. And so that always includes at a minimum, something to reshape the breast and to reshape the abdomen, two things that are obviously affected by breastfeeding and pregnancy and everything. So a mommy makeover, you can be pretty confident in it, it involves a breast procedure and a tummy tuck. And just to clarify, a tummy tuck is when we remove excess skin, but also we tighten up the abdominal wall because it’s something called a rectus diastasis where the abdominal wall stretches out from pregnancy. And we reposition the belly button after removing the excess skin and the stretch marks. So that’s the tummy tuck.
Dr. Bae:
With the breast procedure, it could either be a breast lift where we just remove excess skin to lift the breast. If they’re looking pendulous from having by breastfeeding, we can-
Greg:
Love that word. [crosstalk 00:01:33]. Pendulous.
Dr. Bae:
Ain’t that a great word. I try to use it in every conversation. But we remove the excess skin to lift the breast at the very minimum, or if somebody doesn’t have really droopy breasts, but they’re deflated, then we can just put in implants. And if they have a combination of droopiness and deflation, then we can do a breast lift with implants. And the way I try to explain this to make it a little easier to remember for patients is that we talk about a mommy makeover, but then we talk about a type one, two or three. So mommy makeover, breast procedure, tummy tuck. Type one is just a breast lift. Type two is a breast augmentation where we put in implants. And type three is a breast lift with implants. So the types just help discern what breast procedure we’re doing, but hopefully that makes sense to the patient. But yeah, mommy makeover, great procedure. We can do all those procedures, the breast procedure, the tummy tuck, all in one operation.
Postop Recovery
Greg:
And the nice thing about that is if you get several procedures at once, you can do the recovery all at once and you’re not having to recover several different times.
Dr. Bae:
It’s true. Because I know people are worried about, “Oh, if I do the breast and the tummy tuck all at the same time, I’m not going to be in too much pain,” but the truth is if you get the tummy tuck, you might as well get the breast procedure because most of the discomfort or pain is going to be from the tummy tuck. You’ll have some abdominal cramping where we tighten up the abdominal wall and the breast procedure is maybe, yes, more painful, but within a couple of days, you’re going to be so happy you did them together because if you do them separately, then you have two recoveries and it’s more expensive when you do them separately, because we can save a little bit of time by combining them. So definitely [crosstalk 00:03:10] combining is the way to go.
Greg:
Save the money. Save the pain. Save the recovery. And my last question is, I don’t actually have to give birth to have a mommy makeover. Do I?
You don’t have to be a Mommy for a Mommy Makeover
Dr. Bae:
No, no. That’s a really good point. If, for whatever reason, you’ve lost some weight, maybe you’ve lost about 20 pounds, you had a gastric bypass, something like that. Surgical weight loss, medical weight loss, you’re just eating better and dieting and working out, if you’ve lost some fat and your abdomen is looking a little deflated, your breasts are looking a little deflated, then yes, you can do a mommy makeover without having kids. The other thing is we also can combine a Brazilian butt lift with a mommy makeover, because just the way the breast deflate, the butt can deflate. And we can take fat from your whole torso, liposuction, inject that into the butt. We call that a mommy makeover deluxe. That’s what I’ll say [crosstalk 00:03:59]. Every doctor has their different definitions of mommy makeover, so that’s kind of our made up term is a mommy makeover deluxe, which includes breast procedure, tummy talk, and then Brazilian butt lift. So now you know everything you need to know.
Greg:
The deluxe is with sour cream, because it always goes to the booty. Thanks Dr. Bae.
Dr. Bae:
Exactly right. My pleasure.
Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.
