A Limb Reduction Surgery Success Story

The limb reduction surgery process of our American patient, who is in her early 20s, was a good and healthy experience, both for our patient and our team. If you wonder what limb reduction surgery is, we recommend you to read that article first, then read this success story, which is written after the process has ended. 

Our doctor emphasizes the importance of staying here during the first month of the healing process after the surgery. The reason why is if any complication arises after the surgery, it is most likely to happen during the first month after the surgery. The chance of having a complication is much lower after the first-month ends. 

 

 

 

 

 

Our patient has spent the first month after their surgery with us and you can see her balance pose in this image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yunus Öç has a different approach to limb reduction surgery. As we have said in our other article, muscle imbalance is one of the riskiest complications that can happen with limb reduction surgery. Although it is a low probability, when cutting the bone during the surgery, our doctor drills the bone, inserts a nail and puts a fixator on it. If muscle imbalance does happen after the surgery and it is not able to fixed with physical therapy, thanks to the fixator on the leg, the legs can lengthen back to their original length so that the complication gets treated.

 

These are the images from our patient’s physical therapy sessions

 

Our patient stated these about the pain she felt during the healing process “I didn’t need any painkillers after I was discharged and I only got blood thinners and antibiotics. The first few weeks, there was some edema on my legs and they looked a little puffy but then, it went away.”

Our doctor requested from our patient walk the next day after the surgery to increase blood circulation and the patient was able to do it without any problem.

“There was a big difference in my walks from the first week after the surgery to the last week before I left. Right now, I am able to walk much more comfortably.” said our patient.

We would like to add some more information about height reduction surgery. Our doctor prefers to do the surgery from the femur because there is a higher risk of nerve damage if it is done from the tibia. In addition, as we have mentioned in our previous article, it is highly important for the patient to have thin legs. Before the surgery, our doctor recommended this to our American patient as well. The reason for this is that the muscles and the veins will pile up after the surgery so the thinner the legs are, the easier it will be for muscles and veins to get back to their normal shapes.

Our doctor makes his final decision of how much he is going to cut taking the things that we mentioned above into consideration during the surgery. The amount of cm that is going to be shortened is approximately decided with the tests and examinations before the surgery but there might be some small changes during the surgery because even the 2mm difference can be of great importance in terms of health. 

In the first 1-2 months after the surgery, it is important for the patient to get an intense physical therapy program for them to walk healthily. Therefore our doctor highly recommends patients stay for 1 month after the surgery, as we have said. Like the muscle imbalance, there is a risk of embolism after the surgery and if it happens during this 1 month staying-healing process, the complications will be treated easily.

You can see the height change in our patient before and after the surgery

 

Our patient’s pre-surgery height was 173 cm and now, it is 168.3 cm. We wish her a healthy and happy life with her new height.