Hello! My name is Adrian Richards and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about lower blepharoplasty. I've talked in a previous episode about the operation and who's suitable and the different techniques. Today, I'm going to be talking a little bit about the recovery period, some of the complications that you can get from lower blepharoplasty.
So, first of all, as I mentioned in the previous video, a lower blepharoplasty can either be an external approach with an incision below the eyelashes and coming down in the crows feet area, which is good if you've got skin excess and puffiness or it can be internal by a transconjunctival blepharoplasty which is best just for puffiness.
So recovery period lower, blepharoplasty can take slightly longer to recover than upper blepharoplasty. The reason for that is the bruising tends to stay longer, the swelling tends to stay slightly longer than an upper blepharoplasty. So recovery is really in a week off work, perhaps returning to light work in the second week, probably be okay really for most social activities after two weeks.
Lower blepharoplasty is an operation that has a significant complication rate and it's important to realize this. The risk basically of lower blepharoplasty is to do with amount of skin removal. The laxity and tenseness in your lower eyelid because it's very important that the lower eyelid lies against the globe of the eye so it should lie against the eyeball.
So if you look at your eye straight on, the lower aspect of your pupil should just abut your lower eyelid. So your lower eyelid should just cover the lower area of your pupil. If it doesn't, you've got something which is known as lid retraction where the eyelid is pulled down a little bit and it's important to realize that before you consider having a lower blepharoplasty.
The other important test to do is called the snap test. This test basically assesses how tight your lower eyelids are. So with age, generally the lower eyelids aren't quite as tight as they used to be. The test is to pull your eyelid away from the eyeball and release it and it should snap back quite snappily. If it doesn't snap back, if it goes back slowly and doesn't go back completely, you've got some lid laxity. That needs to be addressed at the time of the lower eyelid surgery, because if you remove skin and there isn't sufficient tension in the eyelid, you can get pulling away of the eyelid from the eyeball and lid retraction where it's pulled downwards.
So pulling away of the eyelid from the eyeball is known as ectropion, pulling downwards is known as lid retraction. Either of these can cause problems with the eye, principally the tears don't drain properly, it feels very uncomfortable because the eyes can either get dry or conversely too wet. That's a functional problem and obviously also you've got the aesthetic problem. So it's very important with lower blepharoplasty that your surgeon assesses your eyes adequately before.
If surgery is performed correctly, because if you do have some element of lid laxity, the surgeon can perform a technique to tighten up the eyelid slightly, so to restore the youthful tightness at the time of surgery. You really need to discuss that with the surgeon. I generally recommend that lower eyelid surgery is performed by someone who really specializes in lower eyelid surgery.
It's not an operation that should be done by someone who does it occasionally, it's a very specialized operation and I think it will be worthwhile really sort of quizzing your surgeon on how many he does and what sort of outcome you're likely to have. Ask him frankly, has he had complications and to discuss those with you.
Thanks very much for listening to this video and watching this video. If you would like to arrange a complementary consultation with any of our eyelid specialists, please do so by either ringing us on 01844 214 362 or just email us via the website which is aurora-clinics.co.uk.
So thanks very much for listening and we look forward to seeing you soon.
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