Houston Aesthetic Plastic Surgeon

Over the past 15 years I have been studying, researching and planning a new concept in plastic and reconstructive surgery. About ten years ago I started telling close friends about it and the feedback was positive. In fact several friends and colleagues offered ideas and insights that helped me modify my technique and improve my outcomes. What has thus evolved is currently a largely underground word of mouth surgical technique that I call “The Pocketplasty.” Essentially I marsupialize humans. The patients are typically either massive weight loss patients or women that are through having babies and instead of getting a tummy tuck decide for a pocketplasty since it is way more functional.

The pocketplasty is a surgical procedure most commonly performed on excess, losse abdominal skin. I am able to surgically fold the skin and create pockets of various configurations and sizes. These pockets have various uses. You can use them to hold spare change or cash, put your cell phone in, or your keys. You can stick a pack of cigarettes in there (although as a plastic surgeon I strongly advise against smoking, naturally!). Smaller pockets are perfect for a calculator or a few pens. The possibilities are endless and I am always amazed at what my patient use them for. Recently I have encountered a younger crowd that had a lot of experience with stretching their skin. These are the same young men and women that figured out how to slowly and progressively stretch their pierced ears so that they could fit very large discs in the piercing hole. Well, with patience and persistence abdominal pocketplasties have been stretched and enlarged to allow mothers to place small infants in these pouches so that we really have created marsupial sacks just like Kangaroos. You can go shopping and use your pouch for groceries. Handbags for these women are obsolete. I have even started experimenting with implanting rare earth magnets on the edges of these pockets to allow rather secure closing of the pocket. So far these “closable” pockets have worked very nicely. Some bizarre requests have come from some men that lost over 150 lbs asking for a pocket on their upper inner thigh. I just couldn’t ask why they wanted them. Another interesting spin off has been the decorations of these pockets. It seems adding a little bling is now caught on. I’ve seen them tattooed with all sorts of designs and temporary rhinestones glued on with crazy glue. True bedazzling of the pocketplasty.

Unfortunately, as with any medical breakthrough, there are complications and unintended consequences. Some people just don’t keep there pockets very clean. So a whole new medical field is burgeoning for my endoscopic colleagues, “pocket endoscopy”. Sometimes it is very hard to see down into these pockets and we have found that the same endoscope used by gastroenterologists works perfectly to look into the depths of these pockets to diagnose such things as ulcers and abscesses. It seems people overlook items they placed in their pockets for days, weeks and even months. This can bee a stick of gum, or an apple or just coins. The result can be rather nasty.

Of course there are the re-do cases when someone wants a larger pocket, or when a pocket has stretched out too much. We may do a Pocketpexy, a Reduction Pocketplasty or an Augmentation Pocketplasty. And as one might expect we have seen isolated and rare instances of cancer of the pocket. Fortunately these case respond successfully to Total Pockectomies. I must say though that the incidence of cancer of the pocket is extremely rare and I am not sure whether these rare patients didn’t just have a skin cancer that was unfortunately located on skin that was turned into a pocket before the lesion was obvious.

At this point you might ask what is in store for the future? I have several ideas, but am not at liberty to discuss them openly for fear that other adventurous surgeons will steal my ideas. It was difficult enough to publish this blog revealing my many years of research on this topic and what I have been able to do with the pocketplasty. Suffice it to say that The Onion is very interested in reprinting this story and if contacted I may consider allowing them to publish it in their outstanding journal. Because as you may have guessed by now none of the above is true, except that I really have been jokingly telling my friends and family for years about the idea of The Pocketplasty.