Hi guys,
I was just replying to a lot of personal messages and wanted to share one in particular because I think it resonates with a lot of people who discover this forum when googling 'leg lengthening'. So maybe, here're some positive food for thought to end such an insidious week.
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Thank you for the long and beautifully thought out message you've taken the time to write me. Yes, I know exactly how you feel because where I grew up and where I live today, there's always discrimination and I think that has screwed up my head so much that it drove me to break my legs, be taller and appear to assimilate.
After 3 surgeries, I actually got worse and worse and lost all my savings and any career/love prospects. I also lost a lot of friends and fought with my family because everyone judged me. It's almost like they believe I deserve to be punished for being so vain and so stupid. Hence, they let me hang and abandoned me.
It's like reading stories of people who do surgery to change their eye colour in India/Tunisia, and then going blind. In the big scheme of things... most people have more sympathy towards someone who went blind due to cancer than someone who went blind because they were vain. End result is BOTH are still victims.
I was so lucky to have met a former Guichet patient who was also in hiding because his bones didn't heal either, after several years. He ran out of money and had no choice but beg the NHS (UK free hospitals) to take him in. They helped him and then, with the NHS doctor's kindness, they helped me too - for free.
The thing is, we really tried everything possible to heal ourselves and grow bones but the mechanics of our body is... lengthening is easier than shortening BECAUSE once we lengthen, the skin and meat fill in but sometimes, not the bones. And we cannot shorten because the nail we have from Guichet cannot stop/reverse. So it means NHS doctors have to hammer out the g-nail, insert another (shorter) nail/external cage and restart the LL process to match both leg lengths. Hence, the least invasive way was to bone graft and even then, I'm left with different leg lengths which became the least of my problems. Did you know that most of us are born with minute leg length disparities? Our hips literally adjust for any minor differences.
After so many years experiencing first hand and being a knowledge pool from speaking to/meeting so many patients and pre-LLers across the globe, my conclusion is this. There are 4 steps to the lengthening process (which could happen simultaneously or in non-linear stages):
1. Lengthening (2+ months)
2. Bone fusing (can be too fast, normal, slow or never)
3. Soft tissue stretching (can take an even longer time to recover posture)
4. Deconditioning (loss of stamina / muscle mass / lingering pain / side effects) and recovering normal walking gait
So depending on our race, genes, gender, age, smoking/dietary habits, flexibility, tibia/femur segment, CLL method - number 1 is the simplest and most linear. After lengthening, bone fusion and soft tissue stretching are actually not in our full control. Each body will heal differently. And depending on our personal willpower and discipline, no 4 can be achieved reasonably well with time and effort.
Most CLL doctors have gotten away with no responsibility because most patients travel to the country of the doctor, stay long enough to merely complete the lengthening process and then return home. Then they run into complications, do not heal well and/or were not fully informed of the realisitic recovery process/timing/inherent risks/lingering pain/side effects. In hindsight, patients come to realize they had just completed Phase 1 of 4 with their CLL doctors and the remainder of the recovery process is literally left at, "Goodbye and good luck!". By then, most patients are too defeated, exhausted, out of funds, in pain, in shame etc to even find the energy/courage to make their original lengthening doctors accountable.
The fact is cosmetic leg lengthening is still a very nascent technology and it is lacking proper regulations in many countries (I'm referring to the entire process from proper screening of suitable candidates, all the way to after care - not simply FDA approval or superficial CE markings on nails). I sincerely hope this changes so that it becomes SAFER for everyone. Some countries are actually starting to regulate/ban certain CLL procedures because the risks are too high and victims have no recourse due to foreign jurisdictions, costs and shame. There is always stigma attached to the desperation of wanting to be taller, the willingness to break one's legs and to risk losing everything in life, if things go horribly awry.
Most doctors who are willing to do lengthening for cosmetic reasons are usually the ones with compromised ethics and ruthless avarice. They prey on our desperation and low self esteem. The doctors who do orthopaedic repair for accidents and birth defects have been doing leg lengthening since the 70s and they do it with some variation of the Ilizarov external cage. Patients with leg length disparities are repaired successfully most of the time because non-cosmetic orthopaedists take their time, have to be fully accountable and are very careful/conservative in their approach.
So that said, coming back to you... until your surgery, you can wear shoes with lifts in them to give you 5-6cm more height, which can instantly boost your self esteem to some degree, workout so that you've a great body and there is a myriad ways to enhance your facial features as well. Most importantly, work on shining from the inside too because inner beauty trumps any superficial exterior. But who am I to dispense any advice worth heeding? I'm the first to capitulate and suffer from low self esteem when it comes to body image.
Do let me know how you do, I rarely come here anymore because the forum is so toxic and it depresses me to no end. You can find me on Instagram and message me there with any questions, ok? https://www.instagram.com/unicorn_gets_taller/
Giant hugs to you and remember... there are many things we can do in our lives to improve ourselves, inside and outside. Leg lengthening is just a very small part of the equation because like most non-CLL doctors say... body dysmorphia starts with healing our heads first in lieu of taking extreme measures to alter our bodies. Because the way we perceive ourselves will never change.
I HATE looking at myself because as a child, my mother used to call me ugly. So unfortunately, that is how I see myself today everytime I look in the mirror. I've been programmed since early childhood to believe that I'm worthless, stupid, ugly and no man will want to marry me. So, I have to fix my head first and probably, needed to spend all my money fixing my head instead of lengthening my legs.
Maybe if I did that, I would be living my dream now, finding love, getting married and having a family instead of the precarious situation in which I find myself today - much worse off than I started in 2016 - poor, crippled, unemployed, not loved, estranged from family and friends, depressed, no stamina and attacked online.
Does this make any sense?
Hugs,
Unicorn
Try harder next time.