I’m Chloe. I’m thirty-four and I live in Cardiff. I have always hated a photograph taken from the side. From the front I could get away with it. From the side, my chin sat so far back that my neck seemed to run straight into my lower lip. I always looked as if I had a double chin, even when I didn’t, and my nose looked bigger than it is, because there was nothing in front of it to balance it. I actually got as far as looking up a rhinoplasty. Then a surgeon here, in a five-minute consult I paid for, said the nose wasn’t the problem. The chin was. I went home and looked at every side-on picture I had. He was right.
Chin surgery. An implant. Putting a piece of something under the skin of my face. I ran from that for a year. What if it slides and I wake up crooked? What if my lower lip goes numb and I dribble when I talk? What if I end up with a square, bloke’s chin? The quotes here were more than I could get my hands on. One night I typed the actual question: is chin surgery in Turkey safe? Not how much. Is it safe. I wrote to Just Clinic Istanbul. I wanted a hospital name, not a brochure. My first message didn’t mention money. I sent the implant shifting, the lip, looking masculine, and a hotel with blood in my mouth. The reply went through every one before anybody mentioned a price. I wanted that from Just Clinic Istanbul chin surgery: a person who still picked up. Here’s the lot.
The first night on the ward
A lot of the ads treat this as a quick job: out of theatre at lunchtime, a bit of tape, find your own way back. I did not want a hotel room with a swollen lip, tasting blood, working out my own ice. I asked to stay the night. They said from the start that I could.
I came out of theatre and went up to a room on the ward. Ice packs under my chin. Blood pressure. Broth, because that first night was liquids only. When I first sat up I felt the tightness under the tape and thought, this is it, I’ve done something I can’t undo. Then a nurse talked me through what was normal, and the panic went down a peg. In the morning the surgeon came himself, looked at the stitches inside my mouth, and only then did we talk about the hotel. I was in Istanbul five or six nights. I did not fly until I’d been back in for a check-up.
The cut is inside the mouth, under the lower lip. They sized the implant on the scan and fixed it to the bone with small titanium screws. “Once it is screwed there, it behaves like part of the bone,” he said. “Talking does not move it. Laughing does not move it.” I talk for a living. I laugh with my mouth open. Months on, I can find the edge with a finger if I go looking. It has not shifted a millimetre.
I stopped lining figures up for chin surgery Turkey and asked the questions I actually needed. Which hospital, by name, and has it got an A&E. The surgeon’s registration. Who is giving the anaesthetic. What happens if the implant needs taking out. Two places sent a price and a smiley. One sent documents and a video call with the person who would actually operate. I woke up in a proper hospital. I paid less than I’d have paid here. I did not pay less for less.
The straw
This is the one that is embarrassing to type. I’d read about people who, weeks later, could not feel the lower lip, who dribbled without knowing. I present at work. That would have ended me.
He didn’t pretend the first weeks would be normal. The small nerves in that patch get bruised by the swelling. Numbness like coming out of the dentist is expected. They do not cut the main sensory nerve. The first two or three weeks my lip felt thick and odd. I drank with a straw. I did not dribble. I did not talk like I was drunk. At week three the pins and needles started — unpleasant, and they said a good sign. The feeling came back. All of it.
The first week smiling felt tight, because of the stitches inside. By the end of the second week, when those stitches had dissolved and the puff had dropped, the laugh was my laugh. No pull to one side. Nobody at work has said a word about my mouth. They have said I look well in photographs.
I wanted a chin. I did not want a man’s chin. Male and female implants are not the same shape. Mine was meant to keep a softer V, not to square the corners. He measured from my cheekbones down and talked about keeping that triangle, not building a shelf. When the tape came off, the profile had a line at last, and my neck looked longer because the fold underneath had somewhere to go. It did not look masculine. It looked like me, from the side.
If you go deep enough on a forum you meet bone resorption: a hard implant wearing a dent in the bone. He did not laugh. Uncommon, he said, when the implant is too big, too stiff, and rubbing. Mine was sized to the bone, sat low, held with those screws so it is not grinding. I am not going to pretend I understood every word. I understood that he would rather explain the rare thing than wave it away.
Week two, ten at night, Cardiff
Me in my flat, a lip that still feels wrong, and a WhatsApp with two grey ticks that never turn blue. Didn’t happen. The person who wrote back to my first message was still answering months later. Around week two I felt a sharp tug inside when I chewed and I sent photographs of my chin at about ten at night. She came back later that night after showing the surgeon: the inside of the mouth healing, sore in a way that panics you and is still allowed. Temperature, pus, the implant feeling loose, the lip getting more numb instead of less — GP or A&E here first, then her. Afterwards. Not instead of.
I’d been to London and to Dublin. I had never been to Istanbul. I don’t have a word of Turkish. Someone was there when I came through arrivals. After that a clinic car for every journey. I never stood on a pavement trying to talk with a swollen mouth.
Four in the morning worried me more than theatre: needing more ice, signing a form I couldn’t read. The same woman stood with me while he marked my chin in front of the mirror. She went through the consent forms line by line, including the bits about the nerve and the rare bone problem. I stopped her. She explained again. When I came round, the first voice I heard said my name and told me it had gone well.
I’d read that once you’re there they suggest the nose. I had thought about the nose. I was an easy yes if somebody pushed. Nobody pushed. I asked, in the end, whether I ought to do the nose at the same time. He said no. Chin first. Let the profile settle. Talk in a year if I still wanted to. I flew home having had the operation I booked, at the figure we agreed before I got on the plane.
A wedding photo from the side
I wanted someone who had sat with an implant in her face, not a sentence on a website. They put me in touch with a woman in Bristol who’d had hers a year before. I asked her about the slide, the dribbling, day two. She was blunt. The first nights you look like you’ve been in a fight. Broth, a straw, sleeping on your back. Then she said: “From the side, I look like myself. I’d never had that.”
That is what booked me. Not the price, and not a filtered photograph.
It’s a year on. I have a chin. I have a neck. The scar is inside my mouth; there is nothing under the jaw that a stranger could point at. I still look like Chloe. I look like Chloe from the side, which is the whole point. I wanted someone at chin surgery Just Clinic Istanbul who still picked up in Cardiff. I don’t hide from a camera at a wedding any more. That is a small sentence. It took me years to be able to write it. Chin surgery Turkey recovery, for me, was the straw and the screws, not a menu of other operations. Chin surgery in Turkey was one implant, one night on a ward, five or six nights in the city.
