One plastic surgeon has given his patients yet another reason to give up cigarettes: Smoking could make their nipples fall off during cosmetic breast surgery.
When Dr. Anthony Youn, who practices in Detroit, warned his patients of this possible surgical outcome, he wasn’t just trying to scare them.
“I’ve actually seen it happen,” he told ABCNews.com.
In his memoir, “In Stitches,” Youn described a smoker whose nipples began to turn dark purple during breast lift surgery, indicating that the tiny veins in her breasts were failing to keep blood flowing properly.
Cosmetic surgeries like breast lifts and breast reductions alter the blood flow to these body parts as it is. But Youn said the nicotine and carbon monoxide from cigarettes could strangle blood flow even more. Body parts that don’t receive blood flow turn from purple to black — to dead, he said.
“Among plastic surgeons, this is a very well-known complication,” Youn said. “If patients don’t stop smoking for three to four weeks before and after the surgery, they put themselves at risk for major problems.”
The risk is not only for breast surgeries. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommends that patients stop smoking well in advance of any cosmetic procedure. In 2009, a report to the American College of Surgeons noted that smoking could complicate the management of anesthetic during any surgery and also hinder a patient’s recovery.
Youn said patients who didn’t kick their smoking habits while undergoing nips and tucks were at a high risk for wounds straight out of a horror movie.
Smoking can, for example, damage or kill the skin of the face after a face-lift, leaving exposed tissue. Smokers getting a tummy tuck could see the skin and fat of their abdomens die off, “leaving a big crater,” Youn said.
Even secondhand smoke could lead to these horrifying complications, which can result in months of recovery and a couple thousand dollars in extra medical expenses.
Youn said he found that the most effective way to get his patients to kick their smoking habit was to tell them the truth about these very real risks.
“Smokers are addicted, and unfortunately, in order to get them to stop smoking, sometimes you have to shock them,” Youn said. “And many of my patients say, ‘Thank you so much for telling me this because now I really am going to quit.’”
Dr. YounOur TeamServicesIn the MediaPatient Info Contact UsDr. Youn’s Book – In Stitches
Scrubs meets David Sedaris in this hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir about a young Korean-American nerd turned renowned plastic surgeon.
Dr. Tony Youn grew up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town where diversity was uncommon. Too tall and too thin, he wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, Hannibal Lecter headgear, and had a protruding jaw that one day began to grow, expanding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. After high school graduation, while other seniors partied at the beach or explored Europe, Youn lay strapped in an oral surgeon’s chair where he underwent a life-changing jaw reconstruction. Ironically, it was this brutal makeover that led him to his life’s calling, and he continued on to endure the four horrific, hilarious, sex-starved, and tension-filled years that eventually earned him an M.D. Offering a window into a side of medicine that most people never see, Youn shares his bumpy journey from a shy, skinny, awkward nerd into a renowned and successful plastic surgeon.
Now, Youn is the media’s go-to plastic surgeon. He appears regularly on The Rachael Ray Show, and his blog, Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery, is widely read and the most popular blog by a plastic surgeon in the country. But it was a long road to success, and In Stitches recounts Dr. Youn’s misfit adolescence and his four tumultuous years in medical school with striking wit, heart, and humility.
For anyone who has ever experienced the awkward teenage years, who has struggled to find his or her way in college, who has been worried that their “calling” would never come, who wants to believe that their doctor really cares, or is just ready for a read that will make you laugh and cry at the same time, this book is for you.
Praise for IN STITCHES:
“Dr. Youn… is a cut above the rest!” –Rachael Ray
“Surprisingly warm and unquestionably witty” — Jen Lancaster, NY Times Bestselling Author of Bitter is The New Black.
“Brilliant and bouncy” — Dr. Drew Ordon, host of TV’s The Doctors
“At times I was in tears, at others I was laughing out loud” –Dr. Robert Rey, star of TV’s Dr. 90210
“A raucously funny and genuinely affecting account of what becoming a doctor is really like” — Dr. Audrey Young, author of What Patients Taught Me.
Too bad they’re attached to a fourteen-year-old boy.
I ease the black marker out of my lab coat pocket and start drawing on my first surgery patient of the day. Phil. An overweight African-American boy. Phil has severe gynecomastia—in layperson’s language, ginormous man boobs. Poor Phil. Bad enough being fourteen, awkward, and a nonathlete in a tough urban Detroit school. Now he has to deal with breasts?
Two weeks ago.
I sit in my office with Phil and Mrs. Grier, his grandmother. Phil lives with his grandma, who’s raised him since he was ten, when his mom died. He’s never known his dad. Mrs. Grier sits on a chair in front of my desk, her hands folded in her lap. She’s a large woman, nervous, well dressed in a light blue dress and matching shawl. Phil, wearing what looks like a toga, sits on a chair next to her. He stares at the floor. “It happened fast,” Mrs. Grier says. “He shot up, his voice got deeper, he started to shave.”
She speaks in a low rumble. She looks at her grandson, tries to catch his eye. He can’t see her. He keeps his head down, eyes boring into the floor.
“Then he became quiet. Withdrawn. He would spend more and more time in his room alone, listening to music. He would walk around all day wearing his headphones. Seemed like he was trying to shut out the world.”
Mrs. Grier slowly shakes her head. “Phil’s a good student. But his grades have gone downhill. He doesn’t want to go to school. Says he’s sick. I tried to talk to him, tried to find out what was wrong. He would just say, ‘Leave me alone, Nana.’ That’s all he would say.”
Phil clears his throat. He keeps looking at the floor.
Mrs. Grier shifts in her chair. “One day I accidentally walked in on him when he was drying off after a shower. That’s when I saw . . . you know . . . them.”
Phil flinches. Mrs. Grier reaches over and touches his arm. After a moment, he swallows and says in a near whimper, “Can you help me?”
“Yes,” I say.
I say this one word with such confidence that Phil lifts his head and finds my eyes. He blinks through tears.
“Please,” he says.
The night before Phil’s procedure.
I can’t sleep. I lean over and squint at the clock on the nightstand. I twist my head and look at my wife, deep asleep, her back arched slightly, her breath humming like a tiny engine. I exhale and study the ceiling.
A shaft of light blinds me like the flash from a camera. My mind hits rewind, and I’m thrown backward into a shock of memory. One by one, as if sifting through photographs, I flip through other sleepless nights, a string of them, a lifetime ago in medical school, some locked in the student lounge studying, some a function of falling into bed too tired or too worked up for sleep. Often I would find myself staring at the ceiling then, the way I am now, talking to myself, feeling lost, fumbling to find my way, wondering who I was and what I was doing. The memory hits me like a wave, and for a second, just as in medical school, I feel as if I am drowning.
My eyes flutter and I’m back in our bedroom, staring blurrily at the ceiling. I see Phil’s breasts, pendulous fleshy torpedoes that have left him and his grandmother heartsick and desperate. I know that his emotional life is at stake and I am their hope. I know also that isn’t why I can’t sleep. I blink and see Phil’s face, and then I see my own.
I was Phil—the outsider, the outcast, the deformed. I was fourteen year-old Phil.
I grew up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town of near wall- to-wall whiteness. In elementary and middle school, I was short, shy, and nerdy. Then I shot up in high school. I became tall, too tall, too thin. I wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, a stereotypical Asian bowl-cut hairdo, and then, to my horror, watched helplessly as my jaw began to grow, unstoppable, defying all restraint and correction, expanding Pinocchio-like, protruding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. I loved comic books, collected them, obsessed over them, and as if in recognition of this, my jaw extended to a cartoon size. I was Phil. Except I grew a comic-book jaw while he grew National Geographic breasts. Like Phil, I only wanted to look and feel normal. I just wanted to fit in.
It hits me then.
My calling—my fate—was written that summer between high school and college, the Summer of the Jaw. My own makeover foreshadowed my life’s work. Reconstructing my jaw showed me how changing your appearance can profoundly affect your life. Now, years later, I am devoted to making over others—helping them, beautifying them, changing them. I have discovered that plastic surgery goes beyond how others see you; it changes how you see yourself. On occasion, I have performed procedures that have saved lives. I believe that I will save Phil.
My mind sifts through my days in medical school, and in a kind of hallucinogenic blaze, I conjure up every triumph, every flub, every angst-filled moment. I remember each pulse-pounding second of the first two years of nonstop studying and test-taking, interrupted by intermittent bouts of off-the-hook partying. I see myself in years three and four, wearing my short white coat, wandering through hospital corridors trying to overcome my fear that someone—an administrator, a nurse, or God forbid, a patient—would confuse me for a doctor and ask for medical attention. I teetered a hair’s width away from those moments that might mean life and death, facing the deepest truth in the pit of my stomach: that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And neither did any of my medical-school classmates, those doctors in training who stumbled around me.
But things changed. Thanks to my small circle of close friends, my focus, work ethic, and drive to succeed, I slowly grew up. I entered medical school a shy, skinny, awkward nerd with no confidence, no game, and no clue. I came out, four years later, a man.
A smile creeps across my face. My eyelids quiver. I catch a last glimpse of the face of my younger self in the ceiling as it shimmies and pulls away. Sleep comes at last.
Phil’s surgery goes well. Ninety minutes, no complications. I lop off his breasts with a scalpel, slice off the nipples, then suture them back onto his now flat chest. I nod at his new areolas. They have decreased in diameter from the size of pie plates to quarters. I leave Phil stitched up and covered with gauze, a normal-looking high school freshman. Good news, Phil. You will not break new ground and become the first male waiter at Hooters.
I once saw an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which a character suggested that she—and every doctor—experienced an “aha moment” when she realized she had become a doctor. That never happened to me. I experienced an accumulation of many moments. Some walloped me, left me reeling. Others flickered and rolled past like a shadow. They involved teachers, classmates, roommates, friends, family, actors playing patients, nurses, the family of patients, and patients themselves, patients who touched me and who troubled me, patients whose courage changed my life and who taught me how to live as they faced death, and of course, doctors—doctors who were kind, doctors who were clueless, doctors who were burned out, doctors who inspired me and doctors whom I aspired to be, doctors who sought my opinion and doctors who shut me down.
Thinking about all these people and moments, I see no pattern. Each moment feels singular and powerful. They stunned me, enveloped me, awed me, but more often flew right by me unnoticed until days, weeks, months, years later. Until now.
DR. YOUN'S BOOK - IN STITCHES
Source: ABC News
When Dr. Anthony Youn, who practices in Detroit, warned his patients of this possible surgical outcome, he wasn’t just trying to scare them.
“I’ve actually seen it happen,” he told ABCNews.com.
In his memoir, “In Stitches,” Youn described a smoker whose nipples began to turn dark purple during breast lift surgery, indicating that the tiny veins in her breasts were failing to keep blood flowing properly.
Cosmetic surgeries like breast lifts and breast reductions alter the blood flow to these body parts as it is. But Youn said the nicotine and carbon monoxide from cigarettes could strangle blood flow even more. Body parts that don’t receive blood flow turn from purple to black — to dead, he said.
“Among plastic surgeons, this is a very well-known complication,” Youn said. “If patients don’t stop smoking for three to four weeks before and after the surgery, they put themselves at risk for major problems.”
The risk is not only for breast surgeries. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommends that patients stop smoking well in advance of any cosmetic procedure. In 2009, a report to the American College of Surgeons noted that smoking could complicate the management of anesthetic during any surgery and also hinder a patient’s recovery.
Youn said patients who didn’t kick their smoking habits while undergoing nips and tucks were at a high risk for wounds straight out of a horror movie.
Smoking can, for example, damage or kill the skin of the face after a face-lift, leaving exposed tissue. Smokers getting a tummy tuck could see the skin and fat of their abdomens die off, “leaving a big crater,” Youn said.
Even secondhand smoke could lead to these horrifying complications, which can result in months of recovery and a couple thousand dollars in extra medical expenses.
Youn said he found that the most effective way to get his patients to kick their smoking habit was to tell them the truth about these very real risks.
“Smokers are addicted, and unfortunately, in order to get them to stop smoking, sometimes you have to shock them,” Youn said. “And many of my patients say, ‘Thank you so much for telling me this because now I really am going to quit.’”
Dr. YounOur TeamServicesIn the MediaPatient Info Contact UsDr. Youn’s Book – In Stitches
Scrubs meets David Sedaris in this hilarious fish-out-of-water memoir about a young Korean-American nerd turned renowned plastic surgeon.
Dr. Tony Youn grew up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town where diversity was uncommon. Too tall and too thin, he wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, Hannibal Lecter headgear, and had a protruding jaw that one day began to grow, expanding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. After high school graduation, while other seniors partied at the beach or explored Europe, Youn lay strapped in an oral surgeon’s chair where he underwent a life-changing jaw reconstruction. Ironically, it was this brutal makeover that led him to his life’s calling, and he continued on to endure the four horrific, hilarious, sex-starved, and tension-filled years that eventually earned him an M.D. Offering a window into a side of medicine that most people never see, Youn shares his bumpy journey from a shy, skinny, awkward nerd into a renowned and successful plastic surgeon.
Now, Youn is the media’s go-to plastic surgeon. He appears regularly on The Rachael Ray Show, and his blog, Celebrity Cosmetic Surgery, is widely read and the most popular blog by a plastic surgeon in the country. But it was a long road to success, and In Stitches recounts Dr. Youn’s misfit adolescence and his four tumultuous years in medical school with striking wit, heart, and humility.
For anyone who has ever experienced the awkward teenage years, who has struggled to find his or her way in college, who has been worried that their “calling” would never come, who wants to believe that their doctor really cares, or is just ready for a read that will make you laugh and cry at the same time, this book is for you.
Praise for IN STITCHES:
“Dr. Youn… is a cut above the rest!” –Rachael Ray
“Surprisingly warm and unquestionably witty” — Jen Lancaster, NY Times Bestselling Author of Bitter is The New Black.
“Brilliant and bouncy” — Dr. Drew Ordon, host of TV’s The Doctors
“At times I was in tears, at others I was laughing out loud” –Dr. Robert Rey, star of TV’s Dr. 90210
“A raucously funny and genuinely affecting account of what becoming a doctor is really like” — Dr. Audrey Young, author of What Patients Taught Me.
Too bad they’re attached to a fourteen-year-old boy.
I ease the black marker out of my lab coat pocket and start drawing on my first surgery patient of the day. Phil. An overweight African-American boy. Phil has severe gynecomastia—in layperson’s language, ginormous man boobs. Poor Phil. Bad enough being fourteen, awkward, and a nonathlete in a tough urban Detroit school. Now he has to deal with breasts?
Two weeks ago.
I sit in my office with Phil and Mrs. Grier, his grandmother. Phil lives with his grandma, who’s raised him since he was ten, when his mom died. He’s never known his dad. Mrs. Grier sits on a chair in front of my desk, her hands folded in her lap. She’s a large woman, nervous, well dressed in a light blue dress and matching shawl. Phil, wearing what looks like a toga, sits on a chair next to her. He stares at the floor. “It happened fast,” Mrs. Grier says. “He shot up, his voice got deeper, he started to shave.”
She speaks in a low rumble. She looks at her grandson, tries to catch his eye. He can’t see her. He keeps his head down, eyes boring into the floor.
“Then he became quiet. Withdrawn. He would spend more and more time in his room alone, listening to music. He would walk around all day wearing his headphones. Seemed like he was trying to shut out the world.”
Mrs. Grier slowly shakes her head. “Phil’s a good student. But his grades have gone downhill. He doesn’t want to go to school. Says he’s sick. I tried to talk to him, tried to find out what was wrong. He would just say, ‘Leave me alone, Nana.’ That’s all he would say.”
Phil clears his throat. He keeps looking at the floor.
Mrs. Grier shifts in her chair. “One day I accidentally walked in on him when he was drying off after a shower. That’s when I saw . . . you know . . . them.”
Phil flinches. Mrs. Grier reaches over and touches his arm. After a moment, he swallows and says in a near whimper, “Can you help me?”
“Yes,” I say.
I say this one word with such confidence that Phil lifts his head and finds my eyes. He blinks through tears.
“Please,” he says.
The night before Phil’s procedure.
I can’t sleep. I lean over and squint at the clock on the nightstand. I twist my head and look at my wife, deep asleep, her back arched slightly, her breath humming like a tiny engine. I exhale and study the ceiling.
A shaft of light blinds me like the flash from a camera. My mind hits rewind, and I’m thrown backward into a shock of memory. One by one, as if sifting through photographs, I flip through other sleepless nights, a string of them, a lifetime ago in medical school, some locked in the student lounge studying, some a function of falling into bed too tired or too worked up for sleep. Often I would find myself staring at the ceiling then, the way I am now, talking to myself, feeling lost, fumbling to find my way, wondering who I was and what I was doing. The memory hits me like a wave, and for a second, just as in medical school, I feel as if I am drowning.
My eyes flutter and I’m back in our bedroom, staring blurrily at the ceiling. I see Phil’s breasts, pendulous fleshy torpedoes that have left him and his grandmother heartsick and desperate. I know that his emotional life is at stake and I am their hope. I know also that isn’t why I can’t sleep. I blink and see Phil’s face, and then I see my own.
I was Phil—the outsider, the outcast, the deformed. I was fourteen year-old Phil.
I grew up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town of near wall- to-wall whiteness. In elementary and middle school, I was short, shy, and nerdy. Then I shot up in high school. I became tall, too tall, too thin. I wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, a stereotypical Asian bowl-cut hairdo, and then, to my horror, watched helplessly as my jaw began to grow, unstoppable, defying all restraint and correction, expanding Pinocchio-like, protruding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. I loved comic books, collected them, obsessed over them, and as if in recognition of this, my jaw extended to a cartoon size. I was Phil. Except I grew a comic-book jaw while he grew National Geographic breasts. Like Phil, I only wanted to look and feel normal. I just wanted to fit in.
It hits me then.
My calling—my fate—was written that summer between high school and college, the Summer of the Jaw. My own makeover foreshadowed my life’s work. Reconstructing my jaw showed me how changing your appearance can profoundly affect your life. Now, years later, I am devoted to making over others—helping them, beautifying them, changing them. I have discovered that plastic surgery goes beyond how others see you; it changes how you see yourself. On occasion, I have performed procedures that have saved lives. I believe that I will save Phil.
My mind sifts through my days in medical school, and in a kind of hallucinogenic blaze, I conjure up every triumph, every flub, every angst-filled moment. I remember each pulse-pounding second of the first two years of nonstop studying and test-taking, interrupted by intermittent bouts of off-the-hook partying. I see myself in years three and four, wearing my short white coat, wandering through hospital corridors trying to overcome my fear that someone—an administrator, a nurse, or God forbid, a patient—would confuse me for a doctor and ask for medical attention. I teetered a hair’s width away from those moments that might mean life and death, facing the deepest truth in the pit of my stomach: that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And neither did any of my medical-school classmates, those doctors in training who stumbled around me.
But things changed. Thanks to my small circle of close friends, my focus, work ethic, and drive to succeed, I slowly grew up. I entered medical school a shy, skinny, awkward nerd with no confidence, no game, and no clue. I came out, four years later, a man.
A smile creeps across my face. My eyelids quiver. I catch a last glimpse of the face of my younger self in the ceiling as it shimmies and pulls away. Sleep comes at last.
Phil’s surgery goes well. Ninety minutes, no complications. I lop off his breasts with a scalpel, slice off the nipples, then suture them back onto his now flat chest. I nod at his new areolas. They have decreased in diameter from the size of pie plates to quarters. I leave Phil stitched up and covered with gauze, a normal-looking high school freshman. Good news, Phil. You will not break new ground and become the first male waiter at Hooters.
I once saw an episode of Grey’s Anatomy in which a character suggested that she—and every doctor—experienced an “aha moment” when she realized she had become a doctor. That never happened to me. I experienced an accumulation of many moments. Some walloped me, left me reeling. Others flickered and rolled past like a shadow. They involved teachers, classmates, roommates, friends, family, actors playing patients, nurses, the family of patients, and patients themselves, patients who touched me and who troubled me, patients whose courage changed my life and who taught me how to live as they faced death, and of course, doctors—doctors who were kind, doctors who were clueless, doctors who were burned out, doctors who inspired me and doctors whom I aspired to be, doctors who sought my opinion and doctors who shut me down.
Thinking about all these people and moments, I see no pattern. Each moment feels singular and powerful. They stunned me, enveloped me, awed me, but more often flew right by me unnoticed until days, weeks, months, years later. Until now.
DR. YOUN'S BOOK - IN STITCHES
Source: ABC News
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