The Funniest Request That I Received From a Patient Recently

[Ali Emre Karadeniz]

I had a patient today who told me he had massive weight loss recently and is planning a tummy tuck. He thought about his abdominal skin and the hairs being wasted during this procedure and asked me if I could remove those hairs from the island of skin and transplant them on his head!

 

I thought about it. It sounded like a FUT procedure with a skin strip half a meter long and 15cm's wide with only 300-400 hairs on it! The strip would not fit under the microscope! It would take us 6-8 hours to slice the strip and extract 300-400 hairs!

 

I also imagined the patient having a tummy tuck and our team slivering the skin island at the other side of the operating room. We would not be able to bring our microscopes there. The surgeon would have finished the tummy tuck long before we did the slivering. We could not keep the patient waiting under anaesthesia for so long. So I thought maybe we could keep the skin in the fridge and sliver it the following day and transplant the hairs after the patient was discharged from the hospital!

 

Ofcourse I did not recommend this or else I would not be recommended here!

[Squatch]

The worst part it was a woman right?:eek:

[Questionmark]

Lol cool story

[Al - Moderator]

Why not do this the opposite way. Do the hair transplant first.

 

1. Get a good idea of what area the other Dr will be cutting away.

2. Do a FUE procedure in that area using an extra large punch size, maybe 1.5mm to 2mm, so there should be little to no transection. You won't need to worry about punch scars because the entire area will be removed later anyway.

3. The techs cut the large grafts down to normal size which are the implanted into he patient's scalp.

4. Patient can go home and wait until he is healed and then have the extra skin removed by the other Dr. at his convenience.

[Ali Emre Karadeniz]

It was a male patient!

 

Doing FUE first is an interesting idea and it turned out that the patient was hoping exactly for this.

However, if I did it during the same procedure, it would prolong the anaesthesia time enormously. If I did it a while before surgery then I would have to do extensive local anaesthesia, as the donor skin would be very wide, considering the few grafts it is going to provide. I would have to do tumescence just like doing liposuction.

Beside all these, I would have to charge the patient too much in return for what he is going to achieve.

One funny thing is that I don't actually need the skin to be on the patient. I could do FUT or FUE while the piece of skin is on the table!

 

Think it this way or that, it just doesn't sound right

[1966kph]

Which ever way you cut it ( pun intended ) its just not worth it for 300-400 hairs.

Very peculiar suggestion on the part of the patient.

Have a good weekend