Tissue Trauma

Any operation causes some degree of injury (trauma) to your tissues. The more precise and delicate the surgery, the less trauma, but some tissue trauma is unavoidable. Your body responds to tissue trauma in predictable ways: pain, swelling, bruising, and stiffness after surgery.

The greater the amount of trauma to your tissues, the more discomfort and other symptoms you’ll have after surgery.

The greater the trauma, the longer it takes your body to heal and the longer it takes for you to feel normal and return to normal activities.

The more trauma and bleeding you experience during surgery, the greater the likelihood you may develop problems such as capsular contracture or hematoma that require additional operations and can compromise the quality of your result.

To put an implant in your breast, the surgeon creates a pocket to receive the implant. The pocket can be behind breast tissue (retromammary), or behind breast tissue and behind muscle (partial retropectoral). If it’s just behind breast tissue, the surgeon lifts the breast tissue off the pectoralis muscle to create the pocket. If you are thin and need more soft-tissue coverage, you need additional muscle cover over the implant, and the surgeon needs to create a pocket behind the muscle (submuscular) or partially behind muscle and partially behind breast tissue (dual plane). Traditionally, you could expect more discomfort, swelling, and a longer recovery. How much longer? It depends on your tissues, and it depends on how the pocket is created at surgery. Since we developed and published the first techniques in the history of augmentation that allow patients to return to full normal activities within twenty-four hours, you can now recover just as rapidly if an implant is placed behind muscle as if it were placed only behind breast tissue! Using our twenty-four-hour recovery surgical techniques, manipulating your pectoralis muscle to provide more coverage, if done properly, does not result in more pain or a longer recovery