I’ve had this surgery done on my right leg 4 times. 3 times on my fibula, at 4, 11, and 17 years old, and once at 26 years old on my femur. The first two had m

I’ve had this surgery done on my right leg 4 times. 3 times on my fibula, at 4, 11, and 17 years old, and once at 26 years old on my femur. The first two had me using the external lengthening frame, which makes for a gruesome looking leg with thin long screws drilled through your bone and poking out to connect to two metal rings whose spacing controlled the lengthening. It’s about as painful as you’d imagine it is to wake up after surgery with a half dozen screws through now your two pieces of fibula. I remember being scared of hitting the frame on things because of how painful it was. At 17 I was able to take advantage of an internal lengthening rod, so no frame needed. It’s much nicer than a frame and I would say that is what all the article’s patients use. Remarkable medical tech. By the time my last one was near I’d forgotten how bad the experience was. I took only 2 weeks off work. I was stupidly overconfident. I spent 1 week in hospital really drugged up and in heaps of pain, with a freshly broken femur, and then got home and had a worse week. It was too painful to sleep for a couple of months and the lengthening itself was awful, as my quad muscles were being stretched in ways that a child’s muscles will handle but my adult muscles were hating. I’d spend over an hour a day stretching my leg that originally could only bend 50 degrees, and more than once the pain brought me to tears. Once I could get to a physiotherapist she was shocked at how cut up and bruised the surgery had made me. Over half the surface area of my right buttock, hip, and upper leg was purple, with 6 new scars. By that point, a month in, I had come to reckon with how brutal this surgery is, and that I had months and months of recovery left. I was not a happy person. Pretty angry, to be honest. I couldn’t walk unaided by crutches for over 6 months, and I’d been aching to be able to walk since about day 14 of my recovery. My right femur is now 4cm longer. People doing this surgery for cosmetic reasons do both legs and much more than 4cm at a time, sometimes 12cm. 12cm in one go must be agony for adult muscles, and it would take a over a year and half to get walking again. Having just experienced 4cm on one leg, it’s incredible that we let people do this to themselves so that they can be more attractive.