Hey folks,
First off: this will not be a patient diary, but rather a collection of my experiences with the LL process as well as the personal learnings I gathered before and after the surgery. I’m writing this in order to give something back to the LL community, which has helped me preparing for the surgery, deciding which doctor to choose and what to expect during and after the lengthening process.
About me
Gender: Male
Age: 25-30
Height: 171,5 cm
Wingspan: 172 cm
New final height: 179,5 cm (8 cm lengthened)
Initial gap after surgery: 6 mm
One word of advice before reading my experiences (although I think this should go without saying): Everything that I write worked quite well for me personally, but should never be blindly followed without checking with your doctor. Only she or he knows your case and knows what’s best for your situation.
With that out of the way, I’ll shed some light on the whole process from start to finish. Hopefully, some future LLers will find this information useful and encouraging.
Why did I choose Dr. Betz?
After finally taking the next step and committing to doing the surgery, I wanted to make sure to only consider highly distinctive doctors in the field of LL with a lot of experience and a proven track record – no matter the cost. This is your body after all, and you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life. Long story short: After reading a lot of positive diaries in this and the old forum, I found Dr. Betz to be the best choice. The surgery costs were about 52K€, which is really not „that expensive“, considering what you get in terms of expertise, service, hospitality, etc. – oh yeah, you also get a new life. Between you and me, I think Dr. Betz could easily charge more than that, however, after talking to him for the first time in the pre-surgery consultation, he doesn’t strike you as the kind of guy who cares about that kind of stuff and is rather interested in serving his patients and developing his field of expertise, This is the second reason why I chose Dr. Betz: Besides being highly experienced and competent, he is really empathetic, which I found to be an incredibly rare combination among doctors (not just in LL). There are certainly other great LL doctors out there, but for me Dr. Betz checked all the boxes and that’s why I went with him.
Preparation before surgery
I started stretching about 4 months prior to surgery for 20 minutes each day, stretching each muscle group (hamstrings, quads, hip flexors, adductors, abductors, ITBs, buttocks). Personally, I thought this was kind of a weak workout, but the PT during my stay in the hospital told me that he only knew one other patient that was in better stretching-wise.
Surgery and 2-week-stay at hospital
Not much to say here. You arrive one to two days earlier to have a second consultation. I don’t really remember my surgery, only going in and out. All the nurses and PTs at the hospital are really nice and helpful. The food is good too. The only thing that was problematic for me was limited choice because I tried to shift to a vegetarian (and even vegan) diet. I will not go into to much detail here because the experiences during the hospital stay have been covered in other diaries at length.
LL process
I returned home two weeks after surgery and continued going to PT sessions in my hometown.
For the next three months, this would become my daily routine:
- Breakfast + taking meds
- Taking a hot bath to loosen muscles (20 minutes)
- 1 hour of stretching (all muscle groups 3x 30 seconds)
- Massaging legs with massage stick (10 minutes)
- Clicking (first took like an hour, then it was done in under 10 minutes)
- Lunch + taking meds
- Work (1 hour)
- 1 hour of stretching (all muscle groups 3x 30 seconds)
- Walking (I tried to get at least to 3000-4000 steps per day, measured by Apple health app)
- Work (2-3 hours)
- Dinner + taking meds
- 1 hour of stretching (all muscle groups 3x 30 seconds)
Now there seem to be also patients who could go directly back to 8 hours of work, but I was satisfied with my routine, since I almost never felt any pain and my sleep was 90%-100% normal. Like said, this worked for me personally. It might very well be that I did my stretching not efficiently enough and that I could have carved out a few more hours of leisure time, but I did not care since I did not want to experiment with a system that worked for me and would be over anyways after three months. So I stuck with it until the end and do not regret it. By the way, during the whole process, Dr. Betz was always only one WhatsApp-message away, which was really reassuring.
In terms of clicks, I started with 20 clicks per day until I hit 3 cm and from there on I went down to 15 clicks until I hit 8 cm. I highly encourage anyone to not go faster than his or her body can recover. Lengthening is not about speed, but to find a pace at which your body feels more „comfortable“ adjusting.
Last but not least, at about 3 cm I developed moderate wide legs (which is quite early according to an experienced PT) even though I and my PT felt I stretched enough. As fast as the wide legs came they vanished at about 5 cm and instead I got a slight duckass. That’s not a big issue though, I simply follow these exercises to get rid of it:
https://backintelligence.com/anterior-pelvic-tilt-fix/And that’s it for now. I might revisit this post in the future to update it with the exact exercises I did (in case you want to know). However, I must tell you that I will probably not have time to tend to any questions that you might have, as, you know.. I want to get on with my life
Hope some of this information was helpful!
Author
Topic: Femurs with Dr. Betz in 2019 (Read 3046 times)