Severe Proportions Neurosis Post LL

Hey everyone, I am fairly new to this forum. Funny enough, I actually joined after completing my LL journey at the Paley Institute earlier this year. It has been nearly 5 months since my tibia surgery and about 4 months since my femur surgery in July and August, as I am a quadrilateral patient. From the very beginning, I went into this surgery very conscious of my proportions. During my initial consult with Dr. Robbins (who now runs the whole CLL dept. at Paley’s), I was very persistent on doing an insanely conservative quadrilateral approach (roughly 5.5cm was my combined total goal). Dr. Robbins tried talking me out of it several times saying that it would be ridiculous to do this little in total and that I was better off doing the femurs. For the longest time, I stuck to this goal and refused to budge even in the slightest as I did plenty of visual calculations before surgery and figured out that I would look pretty good with 5-5.5 extra cm of height. Where I think that things really went south is how brain washed I became when I stayed at the homewood suites hotel with many of the Paley Patients. I noticed that the vast majority of patients were maxing out the P2.2 nail in the femurs all the way to the full 8.3cm, and many of the patients were very surprised to hear that I was only doing 5.5cm in total. Many would even suggest that I do more as I “wouldn’t be getting my moneys worth” for such little gain as quadrilateral is ridiculously expensive. Whether I was totally brainwashed by these other patients or it was the medications I was on, I made a completely irrational decision of lengthening to a whopping 7.5 *ucking cm, thats right, 2 whole centimeters over my goal which I was already skeptical about to begin with. The worst part about the p2.2 nails is that I was wheel-chair and walker-bound for the whole lengthening so I could hardly visualize my walking height from various angles and see if I looked “off.” Even the PT team at Paleys were encouraging me to keep lengthening, saying I looked “great.” Fast forward to today where I am back at home, no longer surrounded with LL patients with distorted proportions, and no longer on medications - meaning I can finally think rationally again and not base proportionally on a select group of outliers. Now that I am able to walk around and record myself from different angles, I realize how ridiculous my proportions look from various angles, especially in shoes, and very upset with my outcome. I would do anything to go back in time and stop the nails flat at 2.6 cm in tibs and 2.9 cm in femurs for a clean 5.5cm gain and no higher. I am a slim guy and the 7.5cm jumps out a ridiculous amount. Even for someone like me with a starting +8cm wingspan over height, not only do I feel like a t-rex now, but my legs look abnormally and sickly long. No amount of muscle is fixing this realistically and I am beyond upset. For the past whole week I tried to talk myself out of thinking about getting a revision shortening, but the more I try to convince myself it looks fine, the worse it gets. I’d love to hear from some of the veterans on this forum, because as of right now, I dont know how this will play out.

I get the point you are making about my wingspan still being around the same length as my height even after double LL, but relative to how I used to look, it does look very off to me visually. The wingspan part I can overlook but the leg length I cannot. After doing 7.5cm, my legs look far too long for the rest of my body, which is actually what makes my arms feel short in comparison even though they are still relatively normal length. The woman in heels thing is different because they often wear a dress with heals or its open toe so you can visually see where their legs end. And if not, it wouldn't matter the same way having longer/masculine arms matters for men as I believe my arms look borderline comical next to another guy of the same height now. I am confused about your last point about doing a small second lengthening as I already did quadrilateral so there is nothing to be balanced as my tibia to femur ratio looks great and isnt the issue here.

I want to believe what you are saying, but at the same time I truly believe that there is a very narrow threshold between what can look good and bad when it comes to LL. Up to 4cm and almost anyone can look fine or good. 6cm+ is what I believe should be reserved for either turbo manlets below 5’ 5 starting or people with short legs and generous proportions, not just good arm length. My starting arm length was good but my legs were very normal length wise. And I truly believe just 2cm between 5.5cm and 7.5cm would be make or break. I guess I will have to do mockups and recover fully before jumping into any decisions on this.

 

Im sure you are right about the fact that its probably 95% in my head and that no one will ever point it out. But for someone like me that went through all that extra pain of a second surgery to have really good proportions, I am very displeased with getting carried away and over lengthening. I’d much rather sacrifice 2cm and look aesthetically better, because I objectively would be closer to ideal ratios at that 5.5cm total than I do after 7.5cm. And because Im a slim guy, the height benefit doesn’t necessarily scale the same way since my lower body just looks excessively lanky more than it already did to begin with. I liked my slim figure to begin with and dont want to compensate because of LL and have to get excessively jacked. I am 5’ 9.5” barefoot as of now and would gladly shorten back down to the 5’ 8.5” - 5’ 8.75” range to look aesthetically better. Face card is good enough to a point where this extra inch is worthless and very unpopular take on this forum but I would take proportions over height every day after crossing 5’ 8”

Sounds good, I’ll write nice and neat just for you next time.

Any thoughts on this neurosis bs? I dont give af about being a half inch taller and getting to 5’10.” Too many people on this forum chase every little ounce of height gain possible even when it won’t look right. The point of this surgery is to boost your appeal, which means proportions should be factored into the height gain ten fold.

For example, a guy that goes from 5’ 5” to 5’ 10” with normal starting proportions will almost never look like a true 5’ 10” guy (narrow clavicles, short torso, short arms, likely small hands) so why chase a high number when it will not be much of a benefit publicly speaking and completely ruin your appeal. If you actually have the ideal proportions to lengthen 5 inches (which almost no one will have) then go for it, but otherwise you are literally making yourself uglier which is not worth the trade off.

Sure, maybe I do have severe proportions neurosis as I doubt many other patients on this forum would do quadrilateral surgery to lengthen under 4cm per segment each. But if there’s one thing I’m grateful for, its that I knew my limits and stayed in a conservative enough range to where I can jump from 15%ile to 50%ile height without anyone batting much of an eye. There are tons of patients on this forum that can’t say the same because they over lengthened and look like uncanny t-rexes.

I respect your opinion, I’m just sharing what I personally think about proportions because everyone seems to think differently on the topic.

I myself noticed that I look far better barefoot now than I do in any shoes over 1” whereas before surgery it was the opposite and I looked far better when wearing 2” platforms. I think what this means is that although I may look “acceptable” or even pass completely unnoticed in a bad way to the untrained eye, that I over lengthened beyond the “ideal” amount for my specific case.

Again like you said, everyone’s starting proportions are different so how much length looks good post LL always depends. I feel that I wouldve looked better at +5.5cm than I do rn at 7.5cm taller. I think getting a revision shortening surgery is very extreme, and I wont do it unless this bothers me for a while and until I fully recover first. In the meantime I’ll just cope by wearing low-profile shoes that add under 1” and avoid platforms or thick sneakers. Seems to help with the proportions neurosis a bit.

As someone trying to make a half-decent athletic recovery, I definitely wont be doing arm lengthening and would rather just shorten my legs a bit if this still bothers me long enough.

Update here 10 months post op:

The proportions neurosis has mostly gone away now that my muscle mass has returned and I am continuing to fill out my legs. I was definitely overreacting about few months ago because the drastic change in appearance was very shocking, but I am now getting more and more used to my new look and proportions.

I do still agree with the fact that I wouldve looked more aesthetically pleasing if I stopped at 6cm combined (3cm + 3cm), but the way I dress with slightly looser clothing and not wearing footwear above 3cm makes up for the slight proportional concerns I have.

Now that my legs are fully straightened out and flexibility has returned here are my main measurements:

Starting Height: 169cm
Amount lengthened: 3.8cm femur + 3.5cm tibia = 7.3cm combined
Wingspan: 177.5
Inseam: 31ish
Final Height: ~176

Thankfully my longer wingspan came mostly from my arms being long as I have pretty average clavicles which I guess are a bit below average for my new height now.