Ptosis Repair in Atlanta, GA

The recovery after ptosis surgery is fairly minimal and the good thing is there are some things that you can do to assist in your own recovery. If you just recover, it's typically four to seven days. If you kind of sit upright in a chair, if you use ice for swelling, if you put ointment in your eyes so they don't get irritated, if you do those kinds of things then you can really minimize it to two to even four days if you're only having ptosis surgery.

Ptosis swelling is highly dependent on gravity. I like to say that when we go to sleep at night, gravity stays awake. So if your head is above your heart, you have better venous return and you have less swelling. A lot of people don't like to sleep with their head elevated, but I tell many of my clients that are on film, fashion models and things, even if they haven't had surgery, to sleep in a recliner the night before they do their photo shoot because it takes all the swelling out of their face. That's the secret to minimizing swelling after ptosis surgery.

Ptosis recovery is completely painless if, and there's a big if, you have to keep your eye lubricated. There are more sensory nerves per unit area in the front of the eye than anywhere else on the body. That's the reason when you get an eyelash in your eye it feels like a tree branch because there's so many sensory nerves. So as long as you keep it moist it doesn't get dry and irritated and you don't get a secondary abrasion. It's completely painless.

Ptosis surgery is a type of eyelid surgery that involves the center muscle in the eyelid. So ptosis repair can be done when you're doing eyelid surgery. It can even be done when you're doing blepharoplasty, which is a cosmetic procedure where you're removing skin and fatty tissue and a little muscle. There's a separate muscle that involves ptosis repair.

Ptosis is basically congenital, meaning that you're born with it, or you develop it, it's acquired later in life. When it's congenital, you have a lot of fatty tissue intertwined like a zipper with muscular tissue and fatty tissue, and it's very weak. When it's acquired, you have a healthy muscle, but the muscle has pulled away from the cartilage plate or the backbone of the eyelid. So you advance that muscle onto the cartilage plate and it raises the eyelid for ptosis repair.

Ptosis is a common symptom that we see with several different diseases. You can have something called blepharospasm, where you twitch and you close your eyelids a lot and develop ptosis from that. You can have a weakness of your eyebrow or you could have Bell's palsy and that could cause you to have ptosis. You could have a thyroid disorder and that could cause you to have ptosis. Trauma can cause someone to have swelling and have ptosis. We even see ptosis after other surgical procedures. Like for instance, if a person has cataract surgery and they have a weakness of their eyelid muscle, they're predisposed to developing ptosis later in life. So by having the swelling of the cataract surgery, they'll get ptosis pretty soon within a month after their cataract surgery. So ptosis usually is not related to other systemic conditions, but it certainly can be. So another reason it's very important to see somebody experienced in all the different varieties of ptosis and how to repair it.