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Cynthia Kemeny describes herself as “a bush woman,” disdainful of pain, who in retrospect has a new, deep

appreciation of the wonders of modern medicine and the extraordinary skills of Dr. Cynthia Gregg, an eminent facial plastic surgeon based in Cary.

Ms. Kemeny lives in Key West, Flori-da, where she spent years doing landscape work that she loved, in an environment that produced a battered nose. “I was working away as usual, when I was clobbered by a coconut tree palm frond, about 11 feet long and weighing what felt like a ton. It wiped me out, and my nose, especially.

“That was five years ago, and because I’m a bush woman, I chose to ignore this event and carry on my life and work as usual—with a badly broken nose. Did it im-pair my ability to breathe through my nose? Without question—but I simply chose to ba-sically ignore that fact and primarily became a mouth breather. In retrospect, I’m shocked at my decision to simply go on about my life without medical care of any kind for several years. Some of us are slow learners.

“And then one day, several years later, I looked in a mirror and said, ‘You know, Cynthia, you really should do something about this.’ I shared this thought with my twin brother, John Kemeny: we’re soul mates. I visit him and his family in Raleigh pretty often, and he had been urging me to seek medical attention for my floppy nose.

“When I was planning a trip north about a year ago, he and his wife, Lori, unbeknownst to me, made an appointment for me with Dr. Cynthia Gregg in Cary. The visit with her turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me in my entire life. The experience has been fantas-tic—it couldn’t have been better.

“What I can say about Dr. Gregg is that she has great gifts. She was so helpful and informative, sharing good information but never pressuring me to move until I was comfortable. And finally I simply told her: ‘I’m ready.’

“The results of her work have been amazing—look at the pictures!! Can you be-lieve she was able to do this??!! She told me this was not simply an aesthetic issue—she was in fact rebuilding my entire nose. And what she did, amazingly enough, is rebuild a nose that would both look great and allow me to again breathe fully and naturally. It’s an amazing difference!

“Family and friends generally share my pleasure with the outcome of this surgery. I say ‘generally,’ because I live in Key West—a very accepting community, which embraces every walk of life and every

conventional and unconventional lifestyle. Some friends might feel I would be insulted if they said, ‘Oh, my God, your nose looks great!’ But my family was over the moon, still is, and there have been absolutely no negatives in this entire experience.”

MiSSinG: nASAL SUPPoRtComments Dr. Gregg, “Cynthia was

a joy to work with. And her nose was in terrible shape. She had a complete col-lapse of her internal and external nasal valve area, which are the keys to being able to breathe well. While her breath-ing was clearly impaired by this injury, she simply got accustomed to it. And in fact, she had lost her septum, the dividing partition between her two nasal cavities. The septal cartilage is the tent pole that holds up the sides of the nose—and hers

was gone. She had no internal nasal sup-port—only the sides of her nose.

“We had to use irradiated rib cartilage, and the project was quite artistic. We had to do a lot of sculpting and carving. We would take a piece of cartilage and cut and mold and shape it, because we had to get multiple graft pieces out of it to make it work. With-out this structural foundation, her condition clearly would have gotten worse over time.”

“Thus, in our surgery, she needed a lot of volume replacement. We did this surgery in January of 2014. She not only had total loss of her septal cartilage, but also had a huge septal perforation: a big hole through her septum. It was actually a major task of nasal reconstruction, a five-hour procedure.”

Dr. Gregg at times refers to surgical procedures involving the nose as “my milli-meter surgery, because simply changing the shape or moving the nose as little as one to three millimeters can produce a striking difference in appearance. When someone’s nose looks as if it’s the product of a surgical procedure, it’s usually because it has been moved too much. Procedures such as this require a lot of technical skill, and also an artistic-aesthetic sense of proportion. We care greatly for both the functional and aesthetic outcome of the procedure.” h&h

ignoring the Pain of a Battered Nose

C Y n t H i A G R E G G , M D , f A C S

for more information about the practice, contact:

CYNTHIA GREGG, MD, FACS JOSHUA SUROWITZ, MD

�550 nw Cary Parkway, Suite �00 Cary, nC �75��

telephone: (9�9) �97-0097 www.cynthiagreggmd.com

Dr. Gregg is double board-certified by the American Board of Facial Plastic and reconstructive Surgery and the American board of otolaryngology—Head and

Neck Surgery, a Fellow of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and reconstructive Surgery, the American Academy of otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery, Ameri-can College of Surgeons, and the North Carolina medical Society.

before opening her private practice in Cary in 1999, she was an Assistant Profes-sor of Facial Plastic and reconstructive Surgery at Duke university medical Center.

Dr. Gregg performs the full range of facial plastic surgery procedures, including forehead and brow-lift surgery, facial scar treatment to correct protruding ears (oto-plasty), nasal surgery (rhinoplasty), eyelid surgery (blepharoplasty), face-lift surgery (rhytidectomy), and mid-face lift.

Dr. Joshua Surowitz joined the practice after completing his medical degree and a five-year residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UNC-Chapel Hill, followed by a Fellowship in Facial Plastic and Recon-structive Surgery at Stanford university in Palo Alto, California.

His clinical interests and expertise include aesthetic surgery of the aging face, neck and eyes, including face lift, brow lift, rhinoplasty, septoplasty, facial fat transfer, and facial liposuction. He also has expertise in the reconstruction of mohs surgery and skin cancer defects, and has additional training in hair restoration.

Cynthia kemeny,

before and after her dramatic

nasal surgery.

BEfoRE

AftER

“This was not simply an aesthetic issue—she was in fact rebuilding my entire nose.”

qUality anD exPeRienCe

Dr. Gregg Dr. Surowitz

Originally published in Health & Healing in the Triangle, Vol. 17, no. 6, health & healing, inc., Chapel hill, nC, publishers. Reprinted with permission.