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I get
up at 5:45 a.m., do some stretching and hit the
pool to swim anywhere between 20 and 30 laps.
Then I hit the shower and get dressed.
I never have time for breakfast, so I'll down
a cup of Green Mountain Pecan coffee and eat a
Power Bar. I leave the house around 7 a.m.
I always take my Lexus sedan to work to my office
on Park Avenue. On the way down the West Side
Highway, I use the time to plan the day and go
over my cases on the phone, because when I walk
in to work I'll be operating until 3 p.m., so
I have to be prepared. Morning operations can
last anywhere between four and 10 hours. Some
of them are real marathons.
I view my work partly as an artistic challenge -
when I was younger, I was interested in art and
architecture. Those sorts of interests really lend
themselves to my work. If you think about it, plastic
surgery really is an art.
Now, when I look at a face, I look at a portrait.
I look at those flattering features and I look
at those features that I find distracting, and
the challenge is to find a way to make those subtle
change so the face has a balance and harmony to
it.
I have been doing a lot of baby boomers lately.
You know, with over 76 million people hitting
middle age all at once, they have a lot of concern
about physical appearance. Think about it; Right
there, with all those boomers that's a lot of
business.
What I hear them talk most about is the basic
puffiness in their face, wrinkles and jowls. One
of the most common procedures asked about is liposuction.
A lot of people want to get rid of those unwanted
fat pockets on the hips, thighs, buttocks, stomach,
thighs, buttocks, stomach and under the chin.
With all the new technology, it's really quite
simple.
I get a cross-section of patients: actors, Wall
Street types, average people from all walks of
life. But what all these patients have in common
is not that they are dissatisfied with their appearance,
but rather they want to enhance their features
to their optimum potential.
For lunch, I'll grab a tunafish sandwich with a
Diet Coke and some yogurt. In the afternoon I have
new patient consultations and patient check-ups.
A lot of people have been asking me about that
Tyson thing. When I heard all the details about
him biting a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear,
I knew I would become immediately popular to have
for conversation. All my baseball buddies were
drilling me with questions about whether or not
the ear could have been reattached or how I would
go about reconstructing the ear.
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Dog and human bites are nasty injuries to work
with. They both carry a high rate of infection.
Especially with a human bite, which carries a bacteria
that in many cases requires a potent intravenous antibiotic
to control.
In these bite cases, there's a lot of tearing.
By the time a patient gets to the operating table,
the wound will usually need a lot of preparation.
We have to thoroughly clean and irrigate the wound
and remove any dead tissue, and pump the patient
with antibiotics.
With an injury like Holyfield's, the closing
of the wound is followed by a complicated reconstructive
surgery to imitate and restore the missing part.
In the case of an ear, it's sort of difficult
because of the delicate cartilage framework.
When a portion of the upper ear is lost, the
reconstruction kind of gets involved and take
a few operations.
I have seen many patients with ear trauma, but never
one related to a human bite. Dog bites are pretty
common. People come in all the time with tearing-type
injuries on the lips, nose, cheek and eye area.
But ears are quite common, too.
I remember one girl who was about 11 years old
who was thrown from a car and dragged about 50
feet. A four inch patch of her scalp and all of
her external ear was scraped away, but she still
had hearing because the internal canal was still
intact.
We ended up doing this very complex surgery
where the cartilage framework of the ear was reconstructed
from the cartilage taken from her ribs. Once we
had the framework restored, we draped skin tissue
from just beneath her scalp over her new ear framework.
The result was a very, very close resemblance
to her original ear. It was really something close
to a miracle.
I call it quits at around 6:30 or 7:00 p.m.
and head home for dinner. My wife, my two sons
and I will always sit down for dinner and try
to catch up. After that, we'll go our own ways
and read or mess around on the computer. My wife and I usually catch a network drama like
"NYPD Blue" or "Chicago Hope"
or "Law and Order" until "Seinfeld"
at 11.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty guilty of taking my work home. At night, when I'm lying in bed, I'll do some creative work and think of what procedures would work on whom. I try to plan the operation and technique. Next thing I know, I'm drifting off.
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