Does a Liposuction Surgeon Have to Sweat a Lot?
When performing liposuction, well..... I sweat a lot. By the end of surgery, my scrubs are soaking wet. The reason is probably that it's hard work ^^. Sometimes, it's so exhausting that my face turns pale and I feel dizzy. That's why I sometimes eat samgyetang (Korean ginseng chicken soup, a traditional stamina food) even in winter. Haha
During surgery, a nurse wipes away my sweat frequently. If I'm not careful, sweat could drip onto the surgical field and risk contamination. Once, I wanted to know how many times my arm moves during a liposuction surgery, so I strapped a pedometer to my arm and operated.
It was an ordinary liposuction case with 2,800cc of pure fat removed... The pedometer read 9,612. I suspect the pedometer didn't register the small strokes without much movement, so I think there was far more movement than that. In the end, at least ten thousand movements~
But there is another reason as well.
What we must be most careful about in liposuction is a complication called venous thromboembolism. When tissue is damaged, our body works to form clots, and the coagulation system is activated. The problem is that coagulation can also be activated inside the veins, forming a clot that may block blood vessels in the lungs, heart, or brain, which can lead to a fatal accident...
This venous thromboembolism
is more likely to occur in situations such as these.
Therefore, we raise the operating room temperature, warm the operating table with an electric heating pad, warm the tumescent solution before injecting it into the fat layer, and also warm the Betadine solution used to disinfect the body. For reference, the operating room at our Venus Clinic even has ondol (traditional Korean underfloor heating). ^^
In addition, we avoid removing an excessive amount of fat, we need to keep the operating time as short as possible, and it can be said to be safer to operate only under tumescent local anesthesia or sedation, which do not paralyze the vascular muscles.
Anyway, for many reasons, a liposuction surgeon has to sweat a lot, just as much as we care for our patients!
I don't think of it as hard work. I'm short on exercise as it is, so I think of it as a workout and do it happily. Though I do worry, hoping my joints don't get worn out... White snow has fallen. I wish all that dark fat would melt away in the white snow.
[ Dr. Jung, Director, Venus Clinic ]
