Face-Lift With Only Local Anesthetic?
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ABC News(NEW YORK) — Identical twins Miki Keller and Donna Keller are inseparable. The 49-year-old sisters from Los Angeles live near each other, vacation together and even feel each other’s pain.
“When she broke her back in Spain, I felt it,” Donna told Good Morning America.
Now the twins are taking their closeness to another level, getting face-lifts together.
“I’ve noticed in the last couple of years everything was sagging, like the neck,” Miki said. “I would see pictures of myself and go like, ‘Oh my god.’”
“I care about how I look. I want to be attractive,” said Donna. “I want to feel younger. I want to match my attitude, so to speak.”
The twin sisters decided to not just go under the knife together but to undertake a kind of twin experiment. Donna chose to have a traditional surgical face-lift under full anesthesia, a five-hour procedure, while Miki elected to try an experimental face-lift using only local anesthetic, meaning she would be wide awake during the hour-long operation.
Dr. Payman Simoni, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, Calif., has been performing anesthesia-free face-lifts for the past six years and said that patients can heal faster with the new technique. He also said the face-lift results appear more natural because the work is done while a patient is sitting up as opposed to lying down.
“Within an hour after they get their face-lift, they get up and walk on their own,” he said of his technique.
While Miki received a face-lift, eye lift, skin resurfacing and Botox at the hands of Simoni, her sister, Donna, turned to another board-certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, Dr. Ashkan Ghavami, for the traditional face-lift surgery.
Ghavami, founder of an eponymous plastic surgery clinic in Beverly Hills, performed a face-lift, eye lift, skin resurfacing and Botox on Donna, and also injected fat cells.
Eight weeks later, both sisters could see results and both had opinions of their respective procedures.
Donna, who underwent the five-hour procedure, said her recovery was initially “brutal,” but is happy with the results.
Miki, on the other hand, said the anesthesia-free route is “the only way to do it.”
“I would do it again. I wish I would have done it sooner,” she said. “We get compliments from our friends. They say we haven’t changed the way we look, we just look better.”
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio