Back to Blog
![]() Since last spring, Tattelbaum is only going into the office for consults one day a week so he doesn’t overlap with other doctors. With social distancing guidelines requiring doctors to limit the number of patients and staff in their facilities, many local cosmetic surgeons have added early morning, evening and Saturday shifts to their schedules. “It’s all about the eye,” she says, “because that’s all anyone sees now if you are out and about and wearing a mask.” As in pre-pandemic days, a lot of patients are asking for nose jobs, called rhinoplasties, and face-lifts, but Porter is seeing an uptick in requests by men and women for eyelid surgery, known as blepharoplasty. Now their schedules are booked three months out, and she’s added an extra day a week for surgeries to meet demand. When he started in July, she worried there wouldn’t be enough business to keep them both busy. In early 2020, she’d signed on to have another surgeon join her practice. “Noses always look bigger on camera,” Porter says. Normally, about 95% of her patients are women, but more men have been reaching out, too-saying that when they see themselves on video calls they look tired or their noses look big. She’s getting twice as many inquiries as she did before COVID, and far fewer no-shows and last-minute cancellations. Since the pandemic, Porter, 56, has been doing all her initial consults virtually. ![]() “There are things they can do to optimize,” she says. Elevate your screens so you aren’t looking down, she recommends, and lean your body forward so your neck is stretched a bit. ![]() She’s heard from so many people fretting about how they look on the computer screen that she’s started to give advice about camera angles and lighting. Jennifer Parker Porter, owner of Chevy Chase Facial Plastic Surgery, says the word Zoom now comes up in 80% of her patient consultations. ![]() “Everyone kept saying, ‘I know there’s COVID out there, but this is a really good time for me to get surgery.’ ”įor two decades, the most common thing patients asked him was, “How long before I can be back at work?” Now, he says, the number one question is: “How long until I can be on my computer?”ĭr. But then, “people just kept booking and booking,” he says. He knew the county’s ban would eventually be lifted, but says, “I kept thinking, ‘Who is going to want to have surgery in the middle of a pandemic?’ ” When he reopened in May 2020 and his calendar started to fill up again, he assumed it was mostly the backlog of patients who had to be rescheduled. Photo by Skip BrownĪt the start of the stay-at-home order, Tattelbaum, 58, worried that his practice might not survive. Jennifer Parker Porter, owner of Chevy Chase Facial Plastic Surgery, hears the word Zoom come up in 80% of her patient consultations. It would have been hard to figure out what to wear that didn’t make it obvious.”ĭr. Plus, “I was walking funny for at least a month and I had to wear this binder-this corset-under my clothes. “Pre-COVID, I’d have taken a week or two off work, then my husband would have had to drive me to and from my office, like 35 minutes away,” Susan says. But the timing worked so well for her that she ignored his advice and scheduled the surgery as soon as his office started booking again. “If it was your wife who wanted the surgery,” she asked Rockville plastic surgeon Adam Tattelbaum, “what would you tell her to do?” The doctor said he’d probably tell his wife to wait six months and see what happens with the pandemic. But with all the unknowns surrounding COVID-19, and the curve of cases not yet flattening, she and her husband wanted to know if doctors thought it was safe. She wanted to have surgery as soon as restrictions were lifted because working from home would allow for a more discreet recovery. When her office went remote, she used the time to set up a second round of consultations-this time virtually. She started interviewing surgeons in January 2020, two months before the county’s temporary ban on elective procedures. Susan, 41, had been planning to have a tummy tuck long before the pandemic arrived. No one from her office knew she was lying in bed in her pajamas. “Luckily, we were looking at hundreds of spreadsheets and there were 30 of us, so no big screens,” she says. Susan (not her real name) was still on pain medications and couldn’t stand upright, but she felt well enough to turn on her camera and participate. A week after her tummy tuck last June, a Rockville mother of two was on Zoom for her company’s annual meeting.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |