FACE ON
By Nancy Clark

Fifty is right around the corner...not 50 as in mph, but 50 as in the big one. I commiserate with a friend. “My birthday is only four months away and life was supposed to be different than this.” “It’s only three months away. You’re miscounting,” he lobs a response back at me.

I think back to the first time I returned home from a semester at college on the East Coast. I anxiously waited at the curb outside Stapleton Airport’s baggage area for my mother to pick me up. My plane had been delayed out of Boston and re-routed through New York because of weather. I was dog-tired but my senses were more alive than ever. I was coming home! When my mother’s silver Cadillac pulled up, it was if I was seeing her for the first time. Her face was, well, creased and wrinkled in a way I hadn’t remembered it. Maybe I had never really taken the time to look. My grandmother’s skin came to mind, like finely crumpled onion skin paper smoothed back out to flatness. In my mind’s eye, their skin was what 50 looked like.

I am perched on the edge of my chair at Faces First with an appointment to see Dr. Jeffrey Raval. I am here to see what he will suggest I do to stay looking young. My close girlfriends tell me I don’t even look close to 50. Those not so close to me guess that maybe I’m 47. And I think perhaps those are the most honest observers. Nonetheless, I don’t want to progress down this road toward 50 and beyond feeling that there’s nothing I can do except spout “genetics” into my reflection in the mirror each morning.

That’s where a surgeon’s expertise in both surgery and human relations comes into play.

Think about it. No one wants a surgeon who will follow the layperson’s direction. Instead, we turn to surgeons—especially those dealing with our foremost feature, our faces—for their expert advice.

Dr. Raval appears fresh-faced and young. Were I a bartender, I’d card him, I vow to myself. When he touches my face, any reservation I have about his youthfulness dissipates. His hands are sturdy and certain. It was just as an acquaintance had told me, “His hands speak expertise.”

Absolutely, that’s why I’m here. Any woman...or man, for that matter, seeks out a facial cosmetic surgeon by his reputation. Dr. Raval’s is that of being the “Nose Guy” in Denver. While he offers extensive services related to being a facial cosmetic surgeon—the type of services, I as a nearing-50 woman want—he is highly regarded in the medical community and in the patient world as being the doctor who performs outstanding rhinoplasty and rhinoplasty revisions, an even more difficult procedure because of the complication of scar tissue, etc.

Dr. Raval was most recently named the Division Head for ENT at Swedish Hospital. He earned his bachelor’s in biology from the University Of Michigan School Of Medicine in Ann Arbor and received his medical doctorate with distinction from the same school. He did his residency and internship at the Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, his fellowship in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the Department of Otolarynology at the University of Miami in Florida, and is board certified by the American Board of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery. He earned the third highest score in the country on his Facial Plastics Board exam.

The 34-year-old Dr. Raval is one of four children born to Dr. Maria Florena, a surgical pathologist, and Dr. Antonio Raval, a retired general surgeon. Upon completing his fellowship in Miami, Dr. Raval chose Colorado above Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Sacramento joining the Faces First practice of Doctors Paul Dragul, Alan Lipkin, and Nicolette Picerno with offices at Harvard Park and Lone Tree. The practice has an extremely busy ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) clientele plus a cosmetic surgery center including all services from facial plastics to an aesthetician.

“The first thing I would do, were I you,” says Dr. Raval, “is to laser these age spots around your left eye.” “Give me a mirror,” I insist. I’d never really noticed them until now, but, indeed, around my lower left eye, I had what appeared to be the constellation Orion’s Belt. Done deal.

Dr. Raval chose ear, nose, and throat as his concentration while in med school because the highly complicated neck anatomy interested him. The move into facial plastic surgery was to Dr. Raval taking his interest to the next level. “Now I have proven myself and have an ability to turn my expertise into an art,” he says.

And art it is.

The typical patient for rhinoplasty is a woman in her 20s and 30s, although men and late teens also undergo the procedure. Dr. Raval prides himself on presenting patients with options for their noses that are in proportion with their other features as well as retaining full function. He’s declined reforming noses for patients who insist upon a nose that won’t suit them well either functionally or appearance-wise. Likewise, he’s suggested to patients who are seeking plastic surgery to satisfy emotional agony that they consider other options, like counseling.

But I am not here for a new nose. I had surgery for a deviated septum, the need generated by roughhousing with my kid sister, 20 years prior. At the time, a friend who had undergone rhinoplasty suggested to me that I get a complete nose job, inside and out. I spent weeks looking in the mirror and alternately at pictures of “Charlie’s Angel” Kate Smith. Nope. My nose wasn’t the nose of my dreams. But I actually like it.

Within minutes, my laser treatment is completed. My next step...well, there are plenty of options that Dr. Raval offers: botox, microdermabrasion. He shows me a before and after album of the wide variety of treatments possible. The results are remarkable. I am convinced that anything a patient needs done is possible in today’s cosmetic treatment world.

But beyond that, during the time I’ve spent talking with Dr. Raval, I am convinced that he’s in this business because he can make a remarkable difference in people’s lives. He points at a before and after of one of his patients, a woman in her 20s with a large and longish nose. The surgery Dr. Raval performs results in a nose that’s ideally suited to this otherwise beautiful young lady. “She came into our office following surgery crying,” says Dr. Raval. The tears were not about unhappiness. “She had stopped to fill up on gas and a man said to her, ‘You are beautiful.’ She told me she had never before in her life been called beautiful.”

The difference in her nose was minimal to others who hadn’t lived behind it. The difference to her life is limitless.