It would appear that I will be getting top surgery sooner than I had hoped. I’m planning on this coming January.
I went to a surgery consult with Dr. Tuan Nguyen here in the Portland area on the 1st. My PCP (Dr. Sara Becker) recommended that I go check him out. Her opinion was that his surgeries are even better than Dr. Brownstein in SF, who I was originally planning to have surgery with. Higher incidence of “dog ears.” With that in mind, I looked him up on the internet, found his web page and emailed his office. Received a reply to my inquiry and made an appointment.
Every time I go to some form of a doctor’s office, my hands always go cold and they don’t warm up until I leave the office. Not sure why… Just one of my quirks apparently. Had a great experience at Dr. Nguyen’s office. Everyone was nice, friendly, and professional. I think he has a limited staff, perhaps one person who doubles as office manager/receptionist, or maybe I jut happened to be call/email/be there on the days that she worked. Dr. Nguyen had a couple of interns with him and they asked if it would be alright for them to join us. I didn’t mind so they came in as well. He started off by explaining the procedure he would perform and answered my questions. He strikes me as a perfectionist, doesn’t want to have to do a revision surgery so is determined to do it right the first time. Definitely a plus in my book. I’d much rather have a perfectionist doing a form of cosmetic surgery.
I liked a lot of things about him. He seemed so knowledgeable and answered my questions without any hesitation. He’s done over 300-400 double incision surgeries over the last 10 years. I’ll probably be under anesthesia for 3 1/2 – 4 hours. Dr. Nguyen takes time to make sure all bleeding has stopped before he stitches everything up so bruising is minimal. I should be back to work in 2 weeks, although I will be on light duty for another 2-4 weeks when I return. I will need to wear a post-surgical binder for about 6 weeks following surgery so I’ll have to look into one of those. The only medication I will have to stop taking will be the aspirin 2 weeks before surgery. Given his results, I’m surprised that his name isn’t really out there. Seems the 2 big names in the US are Dr. Garramone on the East coast and Dr. Brownstein on the West coast. I’ve only seen his name pop up once in the FtM surgery group I’m in and those pictures are only of a lipo procedure… Surprising given his expertise.
Dr. Nguyen took some measurements at the end and had a surgical estimate created for me, which I received in the mail about a week later. Would have gotten it sooner but Labor Day interfered with mail delivery. Based on my specifics, surgery with him will end up costing me $7,551. Definitely cheaper than the $8650, it would have cost me with Dr. Brownstein. Plus with Dr. Nguyen being local, I won’t have to worry about travel expenses or lodging. I can recover in my own home. His office is in the same area of town where I work so any follow-ups will be easy to get to. His office doesn’t accept any payment plans and all costs are due in full 2 weeks prior to surgery. Ends up working out for me in the long run. Took a look at loans available and found a fixed interest rate loan that I could get enough to cover my surgery and my present debts. Calculated it all out and found that the amount I would have to borrow I could have paid back in close to the same amount of time it would take for me to finish paying off ONE of my credit cards due to the high interest rate on it. It all seems to be working out well financially for me. I was thinking that in order to do surgery, I would be scraping by for a while but this now seems feasible.
I plan to go into the office to schedule the surgery tomorrow during my lunch break. January works best for work to have me gone for 2 weeks and the light duty for another couple of weeks. January is typically our slower time. This will give me time to lose a little more excess weight before surgery too. Everything seems to be coming together nicely. Now I just need to see if someone in my family would be able to come up for a week or so to help me out after surgery…
