Plastic Surgery Emergency

Plastic surgery is becoming an increasingly popular option for people who are particularly pre-occupied with their personal image and outward asthetics and beauty. However, plastic surgery can sometime result in medical emergency and medical complications.

Some of the plastic surgery emergencies that I have seen during my experience as a paramedic include the following;

1. In older types of breast enlargement procedures plastic surgeons used to use a silicone based gel to develop the shap of the larger or more shapely breasts. The risk of emergencies as a result of this was the possible potential of the silicon gel to leak, causing potentially lethal imune responses, allergies, sepsis and in some cases anaphylaxis. This are life threatening emergencies.

2. In Europe, an oil based breast enlargement gel had been developed (although this procedure has not been approved in the US currently. The risk of this procedure is that if the oil ever leaks and is absorbed into the circulatory system, it has the potential to cause a fat/oil based embolism (which if can lead to sudden death if the embolism occurs in the pulmonary arteries).

3. All plastic surgery, like any other surgery has the potential to introduce infection into the body. With patients who are having cosmetic plastic surgery for cosmetic augmentation after a mastectomy, they are generally doing so after chemotherapy, which destroys their white blood cells (the ones that fight infection and support your immune system) – consequently, these people are the most at risk for infection and sepsis.