A Nose Made Out Of Rib Cartilage?
When patients hear that a piece of cartilage needs to be taken from their rib for their rhinoplasty, they get shocked, which is quite acceptable, to be honest. And yes, rib cartilage is widely used in rhinoplasty. But when?
In a standard primary nose (a natural nose without any aesthetic operations) aesthetic, a piece of the middle cartilage wall of our nose, called the septum, is taken and a new nose shape is used for both shaping and respiratory support. So why do we do that? We started the nose surgery, made our incisions and gave up, let’s say we sew back the mucosal incisions immediately. Even though we have not touched the cartilage and bones yet, just because we cut the soft tissue and ligament connections, a force is put on our cut line by the elastic forces of the nose skin and your nose shape starts to deteriorate. The fact that we have stitched the soft tissues back cannot prevent this deterioration. Because soft tissue resistance cannot be restored immediately before the healing process is completed.
So, how does this tissue elasticity not cause a problem during nasal plastic surgery (rhinoplasty)? It does, of course. That is why we hear the famous legends of nose tip drop. After our operations, we put the cartilages taken from the septum at the tip (into the columella) so that the tip of the nose does not drop (this is called grafting). If it sounded too technical, let us summarize. We make a new tent from your nose skin and the tent also needs new poles. Apart from that, we put cartilage at different points to support breathing.
Why do we need to take cartilage from ribs? If you have had rhinoplasty before, your septum may have been used for this purpose in the first operation or it may be very damaged when opened and closed. Therefore, while you are intending to go into such a problem for the second time, we should be prepared for the operation with all of the material we need or we may need. This is not something to be afraid of. We take a piece of cartilage from the end of your rib with a 2-3 cm gentle incision in total.
While this sounds crazy for patients who have never heard of it before, people who have researched say that I don’t have ribs, take it from my ear. Ear cartilage is also a very valuable cartilage, but it is not suitable for load carrying task. We use it mostly for soft nose tip repairs, or grafting that does not require resistance.
Our surgeons at Mediface Medical Center Antalya are extremely experienced in this area. That’s why there is no need to be worried about this too much. It’s much easier than you might think and the success rate is extremely high. In addition, you will have a chance to empathize with Eve because you know, Eve was created from Adam’s ribs.
If you want to have more information about rhinoplasty, all you need to do is fill out the form down below. Someone from our team will contact you as soon as possible.