Sculpting Venus
On many a Sunday afternoon,
Joseph Michael Pober, M.D., F.A.C.S. can be found surrounded by charcoal
drawings, oil paintings and plasticine shavings at his feet in his Park
Avenue studio, sculpting out images he's sure he can see just under the
amorphous mass of clay. Pober finds inspiration from such paintings and
statues as Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and the ancient Greek "Venus
de Milo." Man's long search for beauty has taken many forms, and Pober would
add sculpting of the human form to that long tradition. It is this art
form that has brought accolades from the media, his peers and, perhaps
most of all, his patients.
New York's top Park Avenue plastic surgeon suggests that sculpting the ideal "Venus" starts with Venus herself. Often the first thing that Dr. Pober does when patients walk into his office asking for liposuction is determine their typical weight and exercise patterns over the past years. "The body has a target weight," offers the Harvard-MIT graduate, "from which it's not likely to stray far. I encourage patients to do all they can to hit that target through diet and exercise before we determine the areas of the body that just aren't going to respond to other means of weight loss. Whenever needed I give them an exercise video that I personally found efficient in slimming down the body, and can be performed in very short periods of time throughout the day."
Change of Face... Change of Fate
Last week I spent the afternoon in
the office of New York plastic surgeon Joseph Michael Pober, M.D., watching
him change a woman's life. She was only 4' 11", and before she came to him
she had the flat-chested bony body of a child, a big nose, and heavy-lidded
eyes that drooped downward.
He had already given her breasts and reshaped her nose in two previous surgeries. Now he performed a browlift. At one point, as he forced gauze through an incision and up into her forehead to soak up blood, I joked that he was like a magician stuffing a white scarf up a sleeve and pulling it out red. but there was magic before me, and I was stunned by the truth of the old cliche: a single stitch, lifting a single muscle forever, altered her brow and eyelid by about a centimeter and rendered her pretty. Such a small dislocation, such a shift in fate.
When he was finished, I asked if I could see her breasts, she groggily assented. We pulled down the sterile blue paper. She let me touch them: They were full and firm but pliable, like a taut water balloon. There was no scar ecxcept for a faded line in either armpit, barely visible under the creamy talc of her deodorant.
If a single pair of breasts wasn't enough to dazzle me, and hour later one of Pober's secretaries slipped out of her lab coat to show me her implants. She wore a white cotton camisole and the voluptuous curve under the stretchy cotton was breathtaking. Pulling the camisole up, she proudly let me touch her breasts.
It sounds surreal, and it was - but
even more so when I went home and examined myself. I usually find my body
lovely, but that night I was a troubled Narcissus. My breasts - size 34C
- seemed unremarkable, and when viewed from the side gently sagged. I imagined
the doctor's devastating assessment, one I'd heard again and again that
day as we flipped through before and after pictures of patients: "Yes,
her breasts are nice, they're fine (before), but these are great (after).
It changes her whole look. She looks ten years younger." Inevitably, he
was right.
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