What To Do With Swelling After Rhinoplasty
If you have made the decision to forge ahead with nose reduction surgery, you need to be prepared for what is to come after the surgery is over. Warning: it will not be pretty. It will not be fun. It will not be pain free. In fact, you can guess that you will regret having the surgery almost immediately after the anesthesia wears off due to how lousy you feel. All of the those feelings, of course, change once you have fully recovered, but it is extremely important to prepare yourself for a long, hard, bumpy road after your nose reduction surgery. Pain, bruising and swelling after Rhinoplasty is three things you can definitely plan on once you leave the plastic surgeon’s office.
Your Rhinoplasty will be performed on an outpatient basis. You will most likely be placed under a general anesthetic (although in very minor cases, a local anesthetic can be used). Once you have awoken from your procedure, you will be monitored for a while with nurses checking your vital signs before you are allowed to leave the facility to recover in your own home. Since you will highly medicated, you will not be allowed to drive yourself and you must have someone sign a document stating that they will be staying with you for X amount of days after your procedure in order for you to be discharged. This is for the purpose of supplying you with ice packs for swelling, changing your gauze pads and helping you with anything you may need until you feel up to doing the most mundane tasks yourself.
Once you are in your own home, and the full affects of the anesthesia have worn off, now is when the “fun stuff” begins. Pain and discomfort…and lots of it. You can expect to be very uncomfortable for approximately 2-10 days with an average of about 7 days before you start to feel (and look) better. Depending on what type of nose procedure you had done, you can expect bruising and swelling after Rhinoplasty to be present from about 1-6 weeks for a closed procedure and as much as 1-6 months for an open procedure. It is not uncommon at all to have nose tingling (where it feels numb) for several weeks as the nerves recover from the trauma of the surgery. Your bandages should not be removed or changed for 5-10 days. You may be required to go back into the doctor to have them change the bandages, or your companion may have been schooled on how to do this themselves.
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