It has taken me a long time to write this review, because my experience with Dr. Straka was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever had to go through. Getting a lower blepharoplasty with Dr. Straka has been a living nightmare that I can’t wake up from. Every time I look in the mirror or take a photo, I am reminded of the fact that I will likely never have my beautiful almond eye shape back, and that I am stuck with retracted, drooping eyes for the rest of my life.
My story is a long one, but I want to share it with you so you don’t make the same mistake I did and trust Dr. Straka with your beautiful face.
When you decide to get facial plastic surgery, you go into the experience expecting to come out a more confident, refreshed, younger-looking version of yourself. You do a lot of research and find that a doctor has good reviews, and you hear success stories that excite you for the results to come. You feel confident after months of looking through photos and reviews that you’ve made the right decision, and then you go ahead and invest thousands of dollars into something that you truly believe will give you that confidence-boost you’ve been needing.
Here’s what happened to me that I never expected. Three days into my surgery recovery, I wake up only to look in the mirror and see bright red blood spill across my eyeball. The whole vision went black for a second, and I started to panic. I called Dr. Straka’s personal line, and because it was a weekend I understandably had to wait for a call back. When he returned my call shortly thereafter, he stated something to the effect of everything would be fine and that I just needed to put pressure on the wound for 30-45 minutes. I did just that, and the bleeding stopped. Then, just hours later, after barely moving, the bleeding started back up again. I called him once more, and he questioned me at some point multiple times about taking aspirin or NSAIDs, even though I had made it vividly clear that I did not over our first call. It almost felt like he was finding a way to blame me for what was happened.
Fast forward, and for the next three days I experienced more anxiety than I have ever experienced in my life. Despite being bedridden and doing everything I could to reduce my blood pressure, my eye continued to bleed every several hours. Finally, after days of this, Dr. Straka had me come into his office around 9 pm to patch my eye with a huge cotton ball and tape over half of my face. This was one of the most traumatic moments of this experience. I felt I had hit rock bottom. I couldn’t even eat dinner my nurse prepped at home because if I moved my lips too much the tape would come off. And I forgot to mention, I had to pay a nurse hundreds of dollars unexpectedly to come help me for these several days of bleeding. I had to find her on my own via Care.com, because the nurse their office arranges costed exorbitantly more. I also had to delay my flight and pay hundreds of extra dollars so I wasn’t traveling just a day after the bleeding finally stopped after wearing the eye patch. So ultimately, I probably spent over thousands more on this surgery than I had planned for, if not more.
The bleeding did finally stop after the patch, and I finally flew home. After I finally got home and was able to breathe and assess my eyes, I noticed something that shocked me to my core- my eye shape had completely changed. There was scleral show between my lower lid and the brown of my eye, which if I’m not mistaken is essentially called retraction, an unsightly complication of blepharoplasty. Retraction is much more common in lower bleph patients than upper bleph patients.My eyes were also drooping at the corners, giving them a more rounded shape than the beautiful almond shape I was born with. To say I was devastated is an understatement. Every day I would take photos to measure improvement, but I barely saw any. Dr. Straka first blamed the drooping and retraction on the swelling from the TRL laser I did at the same time as this procedure, but that has not shown to be true given that I am 6 weeks post op with clear retraction and eye shape changes still present. He suggested 5-FU, a chemo drug, to be injected and correct the scar tissue possibly causing this retraction. This poisonous drug did not seem to help at all, and as a matter of fact made my life even more of a nightmare seeing as I had to walk around for weeks with swollen eyes due to this poisonous drug.
To add insult to injury, it was rare that Dr. Straka’s team would reach out to me in the midst of all of these complications. I was always reaching out to them. They did not give off a feeling of empathy and rarely showed emotion, but rather treated my like a number and almost as if I was an annoyance. Everyone there should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t know how they sleep at night.
Now, I am trying to come to terms with my new eye shape, but I will never not feel that this operation was the biggest mistake of my life. I’m not getting a revision because I feel like that will just make things worse. Take it from me and don’t do this, especially not with this doctor. I would give anything to have my old eyes back, bags and all.
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