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Since it's been just a little over one week and one treatment, it's a little too early to claim a percent improvement right now. I'll have a better sense in a couple of months, but I'm not setting high expectations since results are typically not seen until multiple treatments. But maybe I'll be surprised!
Hello, it has been a little over four weeks now, and I can see that my skin has improved in terms of overall texture. My skin also feels bouncier and smoother to touch. Redness + swelling are 99% gone.
As for my scars, they appear slightly less noticeable and have subtly improved. They also appearto soften each week as I continue to heal, and I have set realistic expectations for this. I've only had one Infini RF treatment, and I know improvements will be gradual with more sessions. Overall, I'm very happy with how easy it was to recover from the procedure, and the visible improvements so far.
In 6 weeks, I will be flying down to San Diego to see Dr Rullan, and will be trying targeted Phenol CROSS for some of the deeper scars. I plan to continue Infini RF treatments with Dr Weiner's office, most likely in early 2019 due my travel schedule for the rest of the year.
I've attached a before and after picture, and did my best to get the lighting the angle to be similar. I'll continue to provide updates as much as I can.
On 8/27/2018 at 12:09 AM, superburrito said:@grandorI've noticed that his name is redacted in other posts, so I'm staying with this He Who Must Not Be Named trend, haha. I also remember that the contract I signed before the consultation had a bunch of legalese in it. I can't be bothered to reread it, but I didn't want to be in violation of some random clause.
Would someone please pm me the name of this veldemort doctor? Im new to the site and researching doctors all over the country and definitely dont want to waste time and money on this guy!
Hello all! I just completed my first session with Dr Rullan this afternoon, and wanted to share more about the experience.
Getting to San Diego
I live in San Francisco, so getting down to San Diego is thankfully just a short nonstop flight. I took a flight around 10am and arrived around 11:30am. My appointment was late in the afternoon, since this gave me time to get lunch and run errands around the city. I travel to San Diego frequently, so I'm familiar with many parts of the area.
Appointment time confusion
When I landed, I saw an email and voicemail to confirm that I would be coming in to the office at 3:50pm. This was also odd, because my appointment that I made a couple of months ago was for 3:20pm. I called the office, and they confirmed that I should come in at 3:50pm.
Transportation
I used Uber to get everywhere.
The clinic
Unlike a cosmetic dermatology office, Dr Rullan's clinic sees patients for general dermatology issues. The office feels more like an unassuming regular doctor's office, and isn't trying to be extra fancy. I appreciated this a lot, because the clientele was very diverse.
The staff
It was the end of the day, so the front desk staff was not quite as a chipper as they could have been. I'm sure folks were tired and were anxious to get home. The nurses were all great, friendly and accommodating. And Dr Rullan himself is an absolute hoot!
Intake and more confusion
I arrived at the clinic shortly before 3:30pm. The front desk person had me sign my name on a sheet and then asked me to go sit in the waiting area. I waited for about 20 minutes, and at 3:50pm, a very nice nurse called me in. She told me I was early, and it turned out the clinic had me down for 4:20pm. I waited a bit more in the doctor's office, and another nurse tried to find my record in their system in order to take photos. She couldn't find me, and it turned out that the front desk staff was supposed to give me forms to fill as a new patient. The nurse promptly brought the forms to me, and I rushed through the form as best as I could. Once that was all settled, the nurse took pictures of in shadowed lightning. (They turned off all the lights except for a spotlight).
Pre-treatment
Next, the first nurse started to prep my face and clean it with acetone. The smell was pretty intense, like nail polish remover, but I didn't think it was too bad. Dr Rullan came in during this period to introduce himself and tell me more about the procedures. He explained how he particularly specializes in ethnic skin types and that it's a passion of his.
Treatment: Phenol CROSS
After getting prepped, Dr Rullan used a very fine paintbrush to apply the acid. It was a lot less painful than I expected, just a very very mild brief sting.
Treatment: Subcision
Initially, Dr Rullan was unsure if I would need subcision or not. He said he would know once he started injecting me with the anesthesia for microneedling. After doing the CROSS, he started injecting my face in multiple spots. At some point, he decided that I needed subcision, and proceeded with it. I was extremely anxious about this, but was surprised that I felt no pain at all. The odd part is hearing the breaking of scar tissue. I'd characterized it as "almost disturbing". The cracking sound is intense, but I was glad I couldn't feel anything. At some point, Dr Rullan, also noticed scarring on my temples, and did a bit more CROSS there.
Treatment: Microneedling
Next up was microneedling. Dr Rullan uses the Collagen P.I.N. system which does not use RF. This part was also pretty painless, and just a little bit of tingling.
After treatment
Dr Rullan showed my face in the mirror, and I had expected to be a lot more bloody. The bleeding was relatively minimal overall, but my cheeks swelled up immensely. It looks like giant tumors had grown on my face! The nurse told me that this would go down pretty quickly, and that most of the swelling was from the lidocaine injections. The CROSS areas already had darkened and started to scab up, which was a very good sign according to Dr Rullan and the nurse.
Overall time and wrapping up
I arrived a little before 3:30pm and left at 5:30pm. The procedures were efficient and very tolerable. On the way out, I paid for the procedures and scheduled my next appointment. The nurse also gave me a medical facemask in case I wanted to cover up.
Overall experience
Aside from confusion around the appointment time and intake forms, this was a fantastic experience. It was relatively affordable, and also easily accessible from San Francisco. My plan now is to see how I heal from this, and then decide if I want to proceed with only Dr Rullan in the future, or a combination of Dr Rullan and Dr Weiner (I was very happy with the Infini).
I've attached photos of what my face looked like right after the procedure.
It's been over 24 hours now since my procedures with Dr Rullan, and the swelling has come down quite a bit. I no longer look absolutely absurd in terms of swelling, but there's still quite a bit of puffiness left. The scabs are still prominent and very dramatic looking. They seem to have darkened a bit.
After my first Infini a couple of months agoo, I felt pretty comfortable going out in public the next day, because it just looked like a sunburn. This time around with CROSS, I definitely would not feel confident going out. I might consider using makeup/concealer after future treatments. If any of you have make tips for men to cover up CROSS scabs, let me know!
I'll do my best to post updates over the next few days/weeks.
1 hour ago, superburrito said:It's been over 24 hours now since my procedures with Dr Rullan, and the swelling has come down quite a bit. I no longer look absolutely absurd in terms of swelling, but there's still quite a bit of puffiness left. The scabs are still prominent and very dramatic looking. They seem to have darkened a bit.
After my first Infini a couple of months agoo, I felt pretty comfortable going out in public the next day, because it just looked like a sunburn. This time around with CROSS, I definitely would not feel confident going out. I might consider using makeup/concealer after future treatments. If any of you have make tips for men to cover up CROSS scabs, let me know!
I'll do my best to post updates over the next few days/weeks.
Make sure to moisturize too!
It took maybe about a week+ for my swelling to go down completely.
9 hours ago, superburrito said:I might consider using makeup/concealer after future treatments. If any of you have make tips for men to cover up CROSS scabs, let me know!
I think that my routine might work for a man. I use a tinted sunscreen (La Roche Posay Anthelios SPF50+ Ultra Light Fluid-Tinted -50ml--this is a European formulation with a UVA protection factor of over 30, cheapest place to get it is probably Ebay). I put concealer over it where needed, very sparingly, and then a matte powder (tending to yellow rather than pink, currently it's Rimmel) to kill any shine.
I don't use foundation.
If you want to smooth out the look of the mountains and craters you might try NYX primer under your sunscreen.
But it's probably better to just keep the red areas slathered in Vaseline until they heal, if you can stand it. When I got Haloed on Nov. 1 I went out for groceries with only vaseline and sunscreen on day 2. I was still very swollen but I honestly didn't care.
I make more of an effort when I have to go to work.
Hello, just wanted to give you a quick update!
Day 3
The scabs started to loosen, and I actually had accidentally brushed a towel against one and it just fell off, leaving very pink new skin. I started to notice the bruising from the subcision more. I have tan skin, so the bruising wasn't too bad, but it does leave a weird grey tone to my skin.
Day 4
More scabs started falling off. I bought some makeup to try to cover it up, but it ended up being a bit of a disaster. I hadn't noticed that my skin has also started to crust subtly from the microneedling, in addition to the scabs. So the makeup adhered to the crusts, which made the make up look obvious. I'm not experienced with makeup, so I could have just been doing it all wrong. I showed up at the airport with the remaining scabs all over my face. I expected people to stare,but no one really batted an eye. I suppose everyone is so focused on their travel, so it didn't end up being a big deal as I expected at all.
Day 5
It's now day 5, and almost all of the scabs have fallen off. The areas where the scabs were are all now pink. The ones that are taking the longest to come off are the ones on my temples. I expected these to fall off first, since the skin is thinner there. I also noticed a spot on my cheek that is numb, which I assume is from nerve damage during subcision. Hopefully this is just temporary. I had to take some meetings today via videoconferencing, and no one noticed anything. The video compression, thankfully, hid the pink spots and the smaller remaining scabs.
All in all, I'm very happy with how things are healing. It's definitely longer down time than Infini, and I'll have to take a week off work next time. Now that the scabs and some of the microneedling crusts are almost all gone, I'll start experimenting with makeup again to see if I can cover up some of the new pink skin.
Hello all, and thank you for your patience. Work has been nuts, so I haven't been able to post updates. I just flew down to San Diego this morning and did my second round of treatments: Cross, Subcision, and Microneedling. Everything was performed similarly to the first round, except they used a different method of delivering the local anesthesia which required fewer needle pokes. In addition, I received an injection in my hip at the end to help control the swelling.
Also, I decided to try PRF injections to treat hair loss. We'll see how that goes.
Dr Rullan confirmed that he uses a cannula for the Subcision, which reduces the risk of hematomas. He also told me that the shoulders of my boxcars have softened, and that my next session, we should consider fillers. He said that doing fillers on boxcars before the shoulders have softened creates an unnatural look.
My skin two months after my first treatment felt smoother, and I had very little hyperpigmentation issues. There was no dramatic improvement of scarsafter one treatment, but they didlooked less noticeable, and some were very hard to see in certain lights. I would sayit was a 5-10 percent improvement. I'm going that I will continue to see gradual improvements after this second round of treatments.
I haven't had a lot of time to take proper photos, so apologies I don't have anything to share right now.
I've set my expectations to be as realistic as possible, and know this will be a slow process.
Current topicals I've been using recently: Niacinamide 5%, Tretinoin 0.05%, Azelaic acid 4%, Zinc Pyrithione 0.25%. The combination seem to have prevented hyperpigmentation as well as occasional acne lesions that I was still getting.
Quick update, it has been less than 24 hours and my swelling has gone down by 90%. This was dramatically faster than the first round Dr Rullan, so it seems thatthe injection to my hip at really helped. I emailed the office to ask what it was, and they told it was a "Kenalog" injection.
Hello all! @arug, yes it's absolutely agonizing.
As I'm recovering here in San Diego, I have finally have some down time, and was able to put together a couple of before/after shots.
The left side of the photos (taken Sep 29th) show what my skin looked one month after my first treatment with Dr Weiner's office (Infini + PRP on Aug 31st).
The right side of the photos (taken Jan 14th) show what my skin looked like two months after my first treatment with Dr Rullan (Cross, Microneedling, Subcision on Nov 15th.
It's really hard getting the lighting to be exactly the same, but I did my best. What's interesting is that after putting them side-by-side, I was surprised to see the improvements more easily. When I look at my skin day-by-day, it's hard to see improvement since the change is gradual.
@ScarRight, I decided to see Dr Rullan after a recommendation from@beautifulambition. He's closer forme to get to from San Francisco,and I was interested in Phenol cross. As far as I know, Dr Rullan is the only one that does this. Dr Weiner does Infini, but uses TCA for cross, which can cause widening of the scars and has greater risk of post inflammatory pigmentation.
I may go back to Dr Weiner for more Infini this year, since for me, it had a much shorter down time.
Hope that helps!