All Surgery is a Calculated Trauma
A concept that tends to surprise peoples, including surgeons, is, “All surgery is a calculated trauma as far as your body is concerned.” I explain to patients that, “Your body is lying there minding it own business, probably reading the Bible, when someone takes a knife to it. It doesn’t know whether it is being mugged or having surgery and it won’t care. It just goes about the business of healing it up.”
It’s a pretty simple concept. It is underpinning of why you experience what you do after the surgery and why it takes so long. This period of healing usually will “cramps your style” to some extent. Obviously, the greater the trauma the more it will “cramp your style”.
Here’s a common example. In patients consulting me about breast enlargement or lifts I will tell them how the body work when traumatized. I’ll say, “If you were walking down the road and twisted both ankles, both ankles would swell up, both would be bruised and both would have pain. Also the body doesn’t do anything symmetrically and one ankle will swell up more than the other, one will have more bruising and one will be more painful. Since the body will always do what is designed to do and doesn’t care about what we want or desire, it is unlikely that you will be able to go the that dance you had plan to go to that evening.
As related to the breast surgery, both breast with have swelling, one breast will swell up more than the other, one will bruise more and one will be sorer that the other. The same process is found in all types of surgery.
To compound the worrisome postoperative period, as healing progresses, one breast will be slower to settle or lose it’s swelling and one will stay sorer longer, one nipple may be less sensitive or more sensitive than the other. This tends to worry people but that is the way the body operates. There is no symmetry in healing and one side will usually act different from the other side as they heal. But they both will eventually settle just not at the same rate. It is not uncommon for me to say early in the healing phase when referring to settling, “They both race each other down, one wins and the other catches up.”
With any calculated trauma we are trying to accomplish either a functional or aesthetic improvement in the body. The body though does not know the reason why nor does it care.
How Your Body Looks at Trauma or Surgery
What people don’t understand is “Our bodies looks at trauma differently than we do.” Your recovery from accidental trauma or surgery is based on the volume of tissue “beat up on” and not the type of tissue injured. Even though, when you loose a brain cells in an accident that changes your sensory or motor function and affects you adversely, the body doesn’t really care. The body looks at what it needs to clean up and healed after any trauma. The body does not perceive your functional loss.
We commonly think that extra fat cell and skin cells are unimportant. But to the body fat cells and skin cells are just as important as brain cells or heart cells. The body has to feed them, oxygen oxygenate them, take away waste products and conduct immune surveillance on all cell of our body. That’s its only job.
In that respects the larger the volume of tissue injured the more the body has to clean up and repair. The body needs energy to heal the trauma. It is common in the first several days to weeks; it takes the energy from you. The greater the volume of surgery or trauma the more energy the body takes from you. I call it the “punk out factor” and it is related to the volume or amount of surgery. So in large surgeries like tummy tucks and liposculpting there is usually more of a “punk out factor”. Prepare for it and modify your lifestyle for it.