This is really a medical question.
See a dermatologist; if there’s a non-surgical option, he or she should know.
My opinion is better stated that nobody should bother giving you advice. If you asked me why I bothered advising you, then you’d have a valid point. In related news, I don’t understand why people make porn, and yet I confess to watching it.
I’m content to discontinue the hijack if you stop asking me direct questions to continue it.
Every thread attracts annoying posts that aren’t useful. Start a thread about how you don’t like your haircut, and you’ll get people trying to outdo each other on how you’re an insecure failure of a human being.
Ignoring the posts you don’t like is a strategy, you know. No fawning or syrup required.
A friend of mine got bitten in the face by a dog one week before her wedding. She found something, at Walgreens, that was sort of like medicated webbed tape, which she put over the worst of it (one going from the side of her nose down into her lip) and which she could put makeup on. So her wedding photos look fine. She looks perfectly normal. She also felt whatever the stuff was, it helped her heal without a scar. But then, it was a pretty fresh wound.
I don’t remember what the stuff was called and she’s out of the country right now, but IIRC she found it by asking the pharmacist at Walgreen’s.
Congratulations Opal!
If it isn’t possible to have treatment on your scar in the next eight months that is both affordable and effective, then what are you most willing and able to compromise on? As I see it, you either need to find a way to increase your budget for the treatment, or to give yourself more time to have the treatment, or to accept a less-optimal solution like some of those suggested above that you’ve indicated are undesirable to you.
I hope you find a way to get the results you want and I’m sorry I don’t have any advice to offer with regard to possible treatments.
Well it’s not like it keeps me up at night or anything, I just figured that if one of these products actually works (or massaging treatment regardless of product) then I would have enough time to try it between now and then. There isn’t a way to “have more time” as we had just about zero leeway on when to have our wedding without having it be the kind of thing you just wedge into your schedule on a weekend and then go back to life as usual. We really want to be able to take the time to not be stressed and busy right around the wedding, and also go on a honeymoon, even if it’s just going to my family’s lake house for a week or something. It’s pretty much got to fit in the narrow gap between him graduating from podiatry school and him starting residency, after which he pretty much won’t have any time off for a few years. And we’re not willing to wait a few years.
I know this isn’t exactly what you meant, but there are photographic techniques to lessen the appearance of scars, if you haven’t had any luck by May. When photos are taken, you could try to have a flash set at your height or chest-height, which would prevent the scar from casting a shadow on your face, which I gathered is the most visible problem. That’s usually due to overhead lighting, or floor lighting in the case of an up-shadow. You may also want to soften the flash, using an umbrella or a diffusion sheet, so that it doesn’t bounce off the scar and create shine.
As far as when the unplanned snapshots are taken, that’s a little harder to control, but at least the posed photos might be what you want.
yeah I think that Emily and I will have to have some “practice shots” beforehand… she’s never photo’d a wedding before and doesn’t have all the professional accoutrements. I’ll talk to her about those suggestions.
I would not recommend trying what I’m about to suggest at the same time as or along with the prescription cream you were given. However, for some strange reason, Vicks Vaporub massaged in nightly seems to have a beneficial effect on scar tissue, both fading color (which you say you don’t need) and softening/causing the replacement of the hard tissue. If you try the prescription cream for a while and don’t seem to be getting results, you could consider trying it then.
As for the teaching hospital, I don’t think you’d have to worry about a student doing the actual procedure, but you could always ask beforehand. I had to have eye muscle surgery some years ago. The opthalmologist who was doing it at University of Michigan Hospital asked for permission for the procedure to be videotaped (1974). I was young and didn’t really understand, and I didn’t give permission (I would today, in similar circumstances; nobody’s gonna see your face). He did have residents and interns observing. In a teaching hospital, the residents don’t start doing anything until their profs feel convinced they’re ready.
I backed out of a quite different kind of surgery several years ago because I wasn’t perfectly happy about some aspects of the surgeon and his practice (details irrelevant here) - not at a teaching hospital per se, but a large one with residents. I made the decision after his office notified my family doctor that he’d be doing the surgery before I’d said I was ready for it - and no, that wasn’t all.
What does all that have to do with your situation? If you feel you can trust the surgeon you see, you will feel comfortable with what (s)he tells you about how and/or how the work will be done. If you’re not comfortable, don’t go ahead with it. It could be that what you need done is - from the viewpoint of the surgeon, at least - trivial. And if it would be done by a resident, you would have every right to talk to that resident beforehand - and I do mean before you go to the hospital for the procedure.
For what it’s worth, I did see a highly recommended plastic surgeon a couple of years ago for a consultation who estimated that it would take about $8,000 to fix the scar.
Silicone pads are helpful for raised scars. They are pricey but not out of the question. If you Google “silicone pads scars” you’ll get plenty of info on sites like this Treating Scars. Best of luck- I think you have enough time for this to make a difference.
I will suggest people note that personal stories do not trump experimental evidence. If you see a doctor and she/he says these things don’t work, that’s probably reason enough to know not to spend money on them. (Also see QED’s note.)
Yikes! I can see why you’re not going to be able to scrape up money for the surgery in a flash, especially with a wedding to plan!
I think that your best bet would be to try and use lighting and angles to your advantage in the posed shots, and try to find something you’re happy with. Have a practice session or two with your friend (hopefully, because it’s a friend, you won’t have to pay a whole lot of money for it) and find out what works best to minimize the appearance of the scar. Take a ton of pictures so you can see if it’s better when your chin’s tilted a little up, or a little down… if the camera should be a little to your left or to your right…
A raised scar is much harder to deal with than just a discolored one, unfortunately. They’ve got some seriously awesome makeup that covers up tattoos, which would work on a discolored scar, but if you’re worried about a shadow from a raised spot on your face, that’s going to be tough. Makeup won’t really do much, and it’s not like you can just go buff it out with a sander! I know it won’t help to tell you you’re adorable anyway and will look fab in your pictures, no matter what, because I never believe anyone who tells me that either. But I’m telling you anyway!
Congrats on the wedding, good luck with the pictures, and I hope you do manage to find the money for the plastic surgery someday.
awww, well thanks. Yeah I am sure Emily and I will take a bunch of practice pictures. She is going to try to come up a few days early to help with other stuff anyway.
Isn’t using photo and lighting techniques merely manipulating the photo before it is taken rather than after? I’m not insisting you do anything (as that seems to invoke your ire), I’m just interested in hearing your reasoning that they are different.
Also, I’d understand if there is no real reasoning (besides digital manipulation “feel[ing] fake”). Not everything in life has to be perfectly rational.
I also realize that this is tangental to your original question. So, for your original question: I wonder if it might be possible to do something similar to what is done on television? If you can’t lower the scar, raise the surroundings with makeup or appliances. Do you happen to know any theater majors?
Well I used to be a theater major, and know most of the makeup tricks. The problem with most of them are that they tend to work with certain lighting from certain angles, and then look weird as crap in any other lighting or any other angles. So I’d be potentially making the photos look better at the expense of looking really bizarre in person at my wedding, which is not really worth it.
The way I see it, there are photos in good lighting with good angles and photos in bad lighting and bad angles. Both show the person as they actually looked, and obviously you try to have more of the former than the latter. The photo should accurately represent how you actually appeared at the time, however. Photoshopping an extra arm onto someone who had one amputated, for example… is just lying. Photographing that person from an angle that doesn’t show the missing arm is not. Everybody tries to have their photos taken at the most advantageous angles/lighting to minimize flaws.
A further example: I would photoshop out a zit on my wedding photos. Why? Because it’s a day-specific blemish and not part of “what I look like in general”. Had the wedding been on a different day, it likely would not have been there. Or I’d be ok with photoshopping a stray wisp of hair that was out of place, because it could just as easily have been smoothed down at the time. Knowing that I had a scar on my face in that time of my life, however, I cannot photoshop that out. There are pictures of me that don’t show the scar much because of lighting and nagle and I know that they’re genuine–that I really looked like that at that moment in time. That means a lot to me. It may not mean a lot to anybody else, but these are my wedding photos and so what means a lot to me is what is important. I don’t want to be a fraud in my own photos. Additionally–think of the whole “covering your tracks” aspect of that lie: you’d have to photoshop out the scar in every single photo from the wedding and the honeymoon, otherwise anybody looking at them would be like “hey, wait a minute… where’s the scar in this picture? You have it in this one over here…”
No one’s mentioned cocoa butter yet? Give that a try. If you could consider postponing your wedding for about 20 years - here’s what happened to me: I’ve a scar on my lip since childhood - raised and about three jaggedy inches long heading towards my chin. Obviously it was getting more prominent or noticable since people started asking me about it a couple of years ago. I started rubbing cocoa butter on it and then one day I squeezed it and the interior came out! I’ve just checked in the mirror and I can see it, but I’ve got to look closely. It’s not raised anymore, just a faint line. I don’t know if the cocoa butter softened the interior or what.
Opal Cat "Additionally–think of the whole “covering your tracks” aspect of that lie: you’d have to photoshop out the scar in every single photo from the wedding and the honeymoon, otherwise anybody looking at them would be like “hey, wait a minute… where’s the scar in this picture? You have it in this one over here…”
I doubt anyone is as interested in your scar as you are, they’d probably think it was a trick of the light if they even thought about it at all. A friend of mine had a huge mole removed from her face and I thought she’d had a haircut.
Obviously–but also nobody is going to be looking at my wedding photos as much as I am, either. Is there really something so wrong with wanting to minimize something that bothers me every time I look in the mirror?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to minimize it. From the time I was 13, I’ve wished that a milk tooth that had stayed in my head had been pulled earlier, as it left me with an upper canine that is distorted - not hugely, but noticeably. Nothing whatsoever that braces could ever do about it. Of course, that was back before braces even became common. So I understand perfectly.
I hope you find something that works for you, whether it’s the prescription cream you’re currently using, or the Vicks Vaporub, or cocoa butter … whatever. Just one thing about Bam Boo Gut’s experience: Some sort of foreign object, or weird tissue formation or reaction by the body is most unusual, so I wouldn’t count on being able to duplicate the experience. Keloid and other forms of scar tissue are much more common. I had a keloid scar on my back from the removal of a mole - also when I was 13. But anything’s possible.
I do hope that, come the day, you’re so involved with everything else that’s going on that you’re able to put the scar out of your mind, and enjoy the day. My very best wishes on the wedding, the photos, and a lasting and happy marriage. 
My cousin had a 3/4"-long raised scar on his face that he accidentally shaved off one day, and it never went back to its formerly-raised self.
Of course, I suspect “slice it off” may not be an appropriate treatment for most scars.