Paulette Hacker couldn’t stop screaming.
In a way, she was.
“c’mon stop!
You’re hurting me!”
she cried to her doctor.
“you’re free to’t scream, Paulette,” a gruff voice answered her.
(Through his attorney, Dr. Bittner strongly denies all of Hacker’s allegations.)
The volume was cranked up loud enough to drown out her cries.
Dazed and sobbing, she struggled into her clothes and found herself face-to-face with a beaming Dr. Bittner.
The doctor gently asked why she was crying, she says.
Then he maneuvered her beside him and told her to smile for a photo.
Hacker had been excitedto fly down two days earlier from Sacramento, California.
But she’d never had elective surgery before and feared having general anesthesia.
“I liked the idea that I’d be awake and in control,” Hacker remembers.
“The surgery really looked like it was for me.”
Unfortunately, the procedure may not have been designed to meetherneeds, but rather the doctors'.
“It has to do with doctors not needing to involve an anesthesiologist.”
Hacker checked to ensure Dr. Bittner was qualified, and there it was: “board-certified.”
“Awake surgery is a carnival sideshow event,” Dr. McGuire says.
“Your life could be at stake with some of these kooks.”
Using a thin needle, Dr. Caruth injects each breast with a small amount of the anesthetic fluid lidocaine.
When the area numbs, he makes his first incision.
“They’re totally alert,” Dr. Caruth says.
“It’s actually a lot of fun; we play music and talk.”
This is the driving reason women choose Awake breast surgery, according to Dr. Caruth.
“They want to have input.
You try it on first,” he points out.
“Women are picky.
It’s like shopping for a new dress or a pair of shoes.”
“To make it sound like empowerment?
The mind reels.”
“That’s not the case here.”
But the large volume of lidocaine used during an Awake surgery poses its own risks.
Dr. Caruth says he uses about half this amount.
Without an anesthesiologist present, patients can also end up in agony.
Dr. Caruth says he’s able to resolve discomfort with an extra squirt of tumescent fluid.
But “you don’t want people with a low threshold for pain,” he adds.
“The stories are just hair-raising,” he says.
“As a surgeon, I don’t want to be operating on screaming people.”
After her painfulprocedures, Hacker returned home bandaged, swollen and sore.
“I hurt so much, I couldn’t function,” she says.
The more facts Hacker learned about her physician, the more disturbed she became.
Those suits were settled or withdrawn.
Given this, Gluck says he strongly believes the criminal case will resolve in the doctor’s favor.
Hacker also discovered that no doctor should have given her lipo in the first place.
“This was all about greed, not about taking care of patients,” she says.
It takes more thanfive yearsin a residency program to train surgeons to do breast augmentation.
But because Awake practitioners use only local anesthesia, they often skip accreditation, too.
“Do they know anything about sterility, about occupational health and safety standards, about infection control?”
Unless, of course, something goes wrongas happened in the office of Sean Su, M.D.
State authorities would soon come to call her Patient A.
As the surgeons removed her implants, they were shocked by what they saw.
According to the investigators' preliminary findings, Dr. Su had created a pocket too small for the implant.
His incisions were “jagged and uneven” and three times longer than appropriate.
Yet his penalty didn’t seem that bad.
There is a tendency for plastic surgeons to “protect their turf from outsiders,” Dr. Su added.
Previously, a rash of liposuction deaths in Florida led to more stringent rules for office surgery.
With little oversight, “it’s a buyer-beware situation,” Dr. McGuire says.
Just ask Paulette Hacker, who hasn’t been the same since her Awake lipo.
“I thought I was an educated consumer, an intelligent person,” Hacker says.
If something seems too good to be true, then it is."
Ask these questions to avoid becoming a plaintiff.
Who?First, check your physician’s background.
Check your doctor’s cred atABMS.org.
Then sniff out any history of bad behavior with the state medical board.
(Find yours at FSMB.org.)
Doctors should welcome questions on this issue.
What?Avoid doctors who hype fad procedures that haven’t been clinically proven.
Watch for that atSurgery.org; until then, scour the site’sPatient Safetysection.
Why?Questioning your motives may be the most important step.
Safety comes before price.
“Think hard about the outcome you expect,” says SELF contributing expertCatherine Birndorf, M.D.
“Surgery can’t fix relationships or make others treat you better.
It’s about tweaking your looks, not changing your entire life.”
Photo Credit: Bill Diodato
