How well you follow your doctor’s postoperative instructions is just as important as the treatment you get from the operating room. Following these protocols diligently can help ensure a positive outcome, just as ignoring them can lead to undesired results.

After surgery, you will be sent home with a bandage dressing on your face that needs to be worn overnight. In addition, you’ll likely have one, two, sometimes even three tubes on your face, with each end attached to a suction bulb drain. They may be unsightly and inconvenient, but for the duration of your recovery (which can last up to ten days), you’ll need to grow accustomed to them.


So what are these tubes for? When a facelift is performed, a large number of lymphatic channels and blood vessels are cut. These leak fluid during the postoperative period, which means the spaces that are surgically created because of these cuts can fill up with fluid. That’s why drain tubes are placed within these spaces. These tubes quickly remove the fluids as the vessels and channels produce them.


The benefits of caring for these drain tubes while you recover cannot be overstated—removing them too early can result in fluid accumulation, which is something you don’t want to happen.