Throw a Louboutin pump on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and you’ll hit a great plastic surgeon: there’s no shortage of talent. But when I was looking for a little facial refurbishment, I had one other odd concern. I asked everyone: Have you ever operated on someone in your family?
I was regaled with stories. Moms, kids, delighted with their outcomes; one guy had recently done his daughter’s breast implants. Finally, I got to the office of Dr. Marc Zimbler. He is not exactly warm and fuzzy, but I had to ask. He just stared at me. “Never, ever. First of all, my mother’s a Holocaust survivor, but that aside, it’s just massively inappropriate. In any other medical setting outside of plastic surgery, it would be strictly forbidden.”
Now that’s the kind of answer that makes a girl max out her credit card.
Why? Because at the time, I thought any plastic surgeon who’d operate on a loved one was bonkers. How can you maintain your sangfroid when the person on the operating table was shouting at you last night to stop cutting your toenails in bed?
And yet, unlike virtually every other medical specialty, plastic surgeons do, in fact, operate on their loved ones. According to a 2010 survey in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, more than 80 percent of plastic surgeons have operated on family members, even though medical societies frown on this practice. Let me boil down the research on this subject:
American Medical Association: Don’t Do It.
Plastic surgeons: O.K. [Pause.] But they want me to do it.
A.M.A.: DON’T DO IT.
Plastic surgeons: FINE.
And then they do it.
The reason many cite is the relatively low risk of the procedures. After all, giving your sister new breasts is not the same as giving her a new pair of lungs. And when there is perceived risk, most surgeons and cosmetic dermatologists do recognize their limits. “I’ll do Botox and fillers and other minor things, but when my closest family member had a skin cancer, I did not treat him,” notes New York dermatologist Dr. Cheryl Karcher. “I sent him out. I wasn’t anxious, but I didn’t want to risk any sort of bias. I don’t want him scarred, for example, because I might take out too much [flesh margin] around the cancer to make sure he was safe.”
When I asked How could you?, surgeon after surgeon told me I underestimate how adept they are at compartmentalizing. The thinking goes: This is not my Mom who tucked me into bed at night. This is a meat suit with thighs that need my attention. Dr. Allen D. Rosen of Montclair, New Jersey, has operated on his parents, in-laws, kids, and his wife of 50 years, and he puts it like this: “I operate the same way a pianist would play the piano. It comes out of your body naturally.” No extra nervousness when it’s your wife? Nope. “It’s the same way a pilot would take his own family on a flight; it’s no different than a surgeon.” (Fun fact: you’re much more likely to die from plastic surgery than airplane travel, though both risks are very low.)
Some physicians tell me their loved ones twisted their arms. Dr. Jerry Chidester of South Jordan, Utah, refused his wife’s request for a mommy makeover for years. “I always thought that if something went wrong during surgery, would I have a clear enough head to make the safest and right decision? Or would my judgment be clouded because I wasn’t thinking clearly?” He tried sending her to a colleague. She refused. “She told me she was my biggest fan. Eventually, I realized that my wife had the same freedom as anyone to choose who her surgeon would be, and she chose me.” His wife, Mindee, who is also his office manager, has Instagrammed the hell out of the results, and it’s safe to say that she, like so many surgeons’ wives, is her husband’s best advertisement.
“This kind of thing used to be hush-hush,” said Joan Kron, the doyenne of plastic-surgery journalism for more than 30 years and the author of Lift: Wanting, Fearing, and Having a Facelift. “You’d say to everyone the work was done by a friend. But now, if they like the work, doctors don’t want someone else to get credit for their wives.” Zimbler agrees. “Either the doctors are too cheap or their egos are too big to refer their family members to a colleague.”
To Dr. Rukmini Rednam of Houston, who has a large extended family, the problem is not operating on family members per se; it’s making sure she operates only on the ones she is bonded with. “I need to have a solid relationship with whoever it is. If there are complications, it can’t be someone who will end up hating me.” When her sister, Priya Rednam Waldo, wanted the lipo/breast lift/tummy tuck that constitutes the modern mommy makeover, Rednam had absolutely no qualms, “even though our mom was a little nervous.” Still, the sister dynamic did play a role. “Three weeks before surgery, we got into a big fight,” Rednam says. “We were on a family trip with my parents, and we all have little kids, and there was some stress.... I can’t even remember what it was about. I just remember we were both mad at each other and I was like, ‘Forget it. I’m not doing your surgery.’ And my mom is like, You guys, just calm down. You’re fine.”
And it was. More than fine. After three children, Waldo feels like she’s got her body back. Still, says Rednam, it is critical that a family member go through the same protocol as every other patient in the office, which includes posing to family members the kind of intimate questions the answers to which you might not necessarily know or want to know. If you don’t get a thorough history, or you otherwise take shortcuts, “you can miss important information” that could affect the outcome of the surgery, she adds.
You also must be careful to ensure your loved one is not helping herself a little too generously to the all-you-can-eat cosmetic buffet. Unlimited access to Botox, fillers, and on-demand lipo can take a toll, as any quick perusal of plastic surgeons’ wives on Instagram will tell you. I still remember attending a plastic-surgeons’ conference where, over the course of five years, one physician kept the same wife but apparently switched out her breast implants, to the point where, in the last year I attended, she was getting into dirigible territory.
Perhaps the single greatest factor for plastic surgeons operating on loved ones? Well, they’re not exactly known for their humility. When asked why a family member would go to them over everyone else in the world, the answer boiled down to some version of: Because I am the best. (And frankly, who wants a surgeon who doesn’t think he or she is the best?)
“I never gave it a second thought,” New York City socialite Muffie Potter Aston told me several years ago after her husband, Dr. Sherrell Aston, gave her a facelift. “I’ve seen his work. I’ve seen him at work. I know he’s a perfectionist. Why would I go elsewhere?” Besides, she adds, “There’s something about being married to a man who can affect one’s beauty and turn back the hands of time.”
I believe Dr. Allen Rosen spoke for all his colleague surgeons when he told me, wistfully, “I wish I could operate on myself.”
Judith Newman is a New York–based writer and the author of To Siri with Love
