Recovery from liposuction is pretty straightforward. Patients usually are in overnight if they’ve had a fairly extensive area of liposuction, for small areas it’s just a day case. They go home in a compression garment, which is like a corset that I ask them to wear day and night for six weeks. You take it off to have a shower, and put it back on again. We see patients at a week to check their wounds and to make sure everything’s okay and just give them some general advice. I ask them not to do any sport for a full six weeks, to allow the area where we’ve done the liposuction to settle down and not get too swollen.
It can take a full six weeks for the bruising and swelling to disappear from the liposuction, so you don’t really know what the end result is until the six-week time point. Even at that point there are some areas in the subcutaneous fat that feel a bit lumpy, and that’s still residual swelling that can take up to three months to settle down completely. So that’s the full sort of recovery time frame, at six weeks I usually let patients return to normal activities, and if anyone’s got a special event, such as a wedding or an event similar to that, I usually make sure they have a full six to eight weeks from surgery to that event.
