Abdominal Repair Surgery

Let’s talk a little bit about bulging abdomens.

There’s 2 components of things that may or may not need repair on the abdomen. The first one is the skin and fat layer. If you got stretched out skin, you’re going to have to have that tailored. You gotta have that tightened. And that’s a tummy tuck. If all you have is a little bulge of fat and flat muscle underneath, liposuction will take care of that.

The most frequent disappointment that I get in the office from people is they come in thinking “liposuction” and they go out with a quote for a tummy tuck. And that’s because the muscle underneath stretches and divides during pregnancy. And if it doesn’t go back to the middle, like after a C-section, where you can’t use those muscles for 6 or 8 weeks, you end up with muscle that has a curved shape. If the muscle’s curved, it doesn’t matter how nice the skin looks, you still have a round abdomen. And that requires muscle repair to get it flat. That’s something a plastic surgeon does routinely in a tummy tuck. So, if somebody has said, “Oh, it looks like you got a hernia here,” unless it a true ventral hernia that’s from an incision or something like that, that repair is best done by a plastic surgeon, as part of a tummy tuck rather than getting mesh or getting repaired by a general surgeon and then coming in and trying to have the plastic surgeon revise and redo all that to make it look good.

So, you got a bulging abdomen, think two parts. Come in and get a consultation, then you know what you need.