Your surgeon may ask you to stop smoking two weeks before your breast enhancement surgery. Even if he doesn’t, which is not likely, you should quit smoking because smokers consistently fare worse than non-smokers both during and after surgeries. Thus it is important to the success of your surgery to decrease your nicotine level prior to it.

The main reason to quit smoking before surgery is because doing so will make you healthier. The bodies of healthy people are able to endure the rigors of surgery and surgical recovery much better than those of people who smoke. Specifically, nicotine causes problems during surgery because it is a vasoconstrictor, meaning it constricts your veins and blood vessels thereby impeding blood circulation. During surgery, the anesthesia already reduces your oxygen supply to risky levels and nicotine only compounds this. As well, the effects of anesthesia are more predictable in non-smokers than in smokers, so that anesthesiologists are better able to prevent and fix complications. After surgery, your body needs blood to deliver oxygen to the parts of your body that need to heal. If they don’t get oxygen, they will not heal. Even worse, they could become necrotic (dead) and need to be removed. Necrosis causes infections and spreads easily to healthy tissue.

The nicotine will be out of your system within a day, but carbon monoxide and other chemicals found in cigarettes will remain much longer, and they, too, cause problems during surgery. They have been shown to prevent clotting, which interferes with the growth of new, healthy tissue and the healing of incisions; and they have been shown to inhibit the body’s immune system.

Another benefit to quitting smoking prior to surgery is that studies have shown that those who do have less severe symptoms of nicotine withdrawal. It may take a month or so for the lungs to show signs of recovery from smoking, but you will be half way there by the time you have surgery. Plus, a new good habit, like not smoking, takes 21 days to form, and you will be close to that point after you come out of surgery.

You may want to smoke very badly, but don’t cheat and think you can fool your surgeon. He will perform a blood or urine test at the pre-op meeting that will reveal whether or not you’ve been smoking. If you have, the surgery will probably be delayed. It is not worth risking the surgery, the success of your implants, or your health for one last cigarette.

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