The Six Follow-Up Visits: Day 1, Day 5, Week 2, Month 1, Month 3, Month 6

What is examined at each of the six points and why that point, how the schedule is built around healing stages, and what is decided at each visit.

After rhinoplasty at Edition, follow-up runs to six appointments over six months: day 1, day 5, two weeks, one month, three months, and six months.

Six appointments is more than many patients expect, and the number invites a reasonable question — whether the later ones are necessary or simply thorough. The answer is that each sits at a point where the nose is doing something specific, and each is looking for something the others cannot see.

This page sets out what is examined at each visit and why the interval falls where it does, what is decided at each, and why the schedule closes at six months rather than earlier or continuing indefinitely. Symptom-by-symptom recovery is covered in its own pages, as is the week-by-week experience of healing and the practicalities of follow-up when you live abroad.

Why six, and why these six

A nose does not heal at a constant rate. It passes through phases, and the phases are not evenly spaced.

The first fortnight is dominated by the immediate consequences of surgery — swelling, bruising, the internal packing, the sutures. Findings in this period change daily, which is why the first three appointments are close together.

The months that follow are dominated by resolution. Swelling recedes at different rates in different parts of the nose, and the structure gradually becomes visible through it. Findings here change over weeks rather than days, which is why the last three appointments are spaced further apart.

The intervals are therefore set by what is happening rather than by convenience. An appointment at three weeks and another at five would produce two readings of the same phase; day 5 and two weeks produce readings of two different ones.

There is a second function running alongside the clinical one. Recovery from nose surgery is a period in which patients form conclusions, often from an interim appearance that points in a misleading direction. A scheduled point at which those conclusions can be checked against an examination is part of what the schedule is for.

Day 1: the immediate check

The first appointment is the day after surgery, and it is looking at the immediate state rather than at any result.

What is examined. The surgical sites and dressings, the degree and distribution of bruising and swelling, whether bleeding has settled as expected, and how the patient is in general — pain, sleep, nausea, and how they have managed the first night.

What is decided. Whether anything requires attention now rather than at day 5, and whether the guidance given at discharge needs adjusting.

Internal packing is still in place at this point. It is removed at day 2, so day 1 falls in the most physically uncomfortable window of the whole recovery — breathing through the nose is not possible, and most patients find this the low point.

Saying so is part of the appointment. A patient who understands that day 1 to day 2 is the hardest stretch, and that it ends at a specific and imminent point, reads the discomfort differently from one who fears it is the new normal.

Day 5: after the packing, before the sutures

By day 5, packing has been out for three days and the earliest phase has passed. This appointment sits in a genuinely different phase from day 1.

What is examined. How swelling and bruising are progressing — the trajectory rather than the amount. Whether nasal breathing has begun to open up now that the packing is out. The condition of the incision sites and any external splint or dressing. Signs that would indicate a problem rather than ordinary healing, which is a specific thing the appointment is looking for at this stage.

What is decided. Whether healing is on the expected course. Whether anything needs intervention before the two-week visit. And what the patient can reasonably do in the days ahead, which matters because day 7 — the point at which most patients return to social activity — falls just after this appointment.

The timing is deliberate in that respect. A patient is seen shortly before the point at which they are likely to go back out into the world, so the guidance about doing so is given with a current examination behind it rather than as a general figure.

Two weeks: sutures and the first real look

The two-week visit has a procedural component. For cases involving ear cartilage or autologous rib cartilage, sutures are removed at day 14.

What is examined. The incision sites as sutures come out, and how they are healing — this is the first proper assessment of the scars, which for external approaches sit on the columella between the nostrils, and for rib harvest at the chest site. How swelling has resolved over the second week. Nasal breathing, now that a fortnight has passed. And whether the shape is beginning to emerge from beneath the swelling.

What is decided. Whether scar care should begin, and what it should consist of. Whether the resolution of swelling is following the expected pattern. And what activity is now reasonable.

Two weeks is the earliest point at which patients start trying to assess their result, and it is worth saying plainly that it is too early. What is visible at two weeks is a nose with a substantial amount of swelling remaining, particularly at the tip. Conclusions drawn here are conclusions drawn about swelling.

One month: the structure becomes readable

By one month the coarse swelling has resolved and the underlying structure is visible for the first time.

What is examined. The line of the bridge, which is now largely readable. Symmetry, assessed with the caveat that residual swelling is rarely even. Nasal breathing, which by this stage should have settled towards whatever it is going to be. The scars, and how they are maturing. And the tip — which is still substantially swollen and is noted rather than assessed.

What is decided. Whether anything is deviating from the expected course. Whether scar care needs adjusting. And what the patient should expect over the following two months, which is largely a matter of the tip.

This appointment is where the distinction between bridge and tip becomes the organising fact of the rest of the schedule. The bridge settles first; the tip settles last. Patients who understand that read the next two months correctly, and patients who do not tend to conclude at three months that something is wrong.

Three months: the bridge settles before the tip

Three months is the appointment most often misread by patients and, for that reason, one of the more important ones.

What is examined. The bridge, which by now is close to its final form. The tip, which is not — and how much swelling remains there, particularly where the skin is thick. The scars at a stage where their maturation is meaningfully assessable. Breathing, as a settled finding rather than a recovering one.

What is decided. Whether the tip is resolving at the expected rate for that patient's skin type. Whether anything requires attention. And, frequently, whether the patient's own assessment of their result is being made against swelling.

That last point is the reason this appointment matters. A tip that is still swollen looks rounder and fuller than it will be — sometimes rounder than before surgery — and a patient assessing definition at three months is reading swelling and concluding that not enough was done. Where the skin is thick, the tip can remain visibly full for the better part of a year.

The appropriate response to a full-looking tip at three months is generally to wait and to keep the six-month appointment, not to plan another operation. Having that said, at an appointment, by someone who has examined the nose, is materially different from reading it on a page.

Six months: the judgment point

The final scheduled appointment is where the result is assessed as final.

What is examined. The nose as a whole — the line from bridge to tip, the relationship between the two, symmetry, and definition at the tip now that most of the swelling has resolved. The scars at maturity. Breathing as a settled outcome. And, where the surgery included functional correction, whether the airway result matches what was intended.

What is decided. Whether the result has met the plan. Whether any residual finding is likely to change further or is now settled. And whether anything is worth discussing beyond this point.

Six months is chosen because it is where the last part of the nose to settle has largely settled. Assessing earlier means assessing a tip that is still resolving; the bridge would give an accurate reading at three months, but a nose is judged as one line rather than in parts.

Why six months is the judgment point, and what "final" does and does not mean, is set out in the page on when a rhinoplasty result is final.

Why the schedule closes at six months

The schedule ends rather than continuing, and the reason is worth stating.

By six months the questions the schedule exists to answer have been answered. Healing has run its course, the structure has declared itself, the scars have matured, and breathing has settled. Further routine appointments would be observing a stable situation.

Closing the schedule is not the same as closing the relationship. A nose continues to change slowly over years, as any face does, and anything arising later is a reason to be seen rather than something the schedule has excluded. What ends is the routine sequence, not access to it.

It is also worth noting what the six-month point makes possible. A decision about whether any revision is worth considering is a decision that requires a settled result, and it cannot properly be made before one exists. The schedule running to six months is what puts that conversation on a foundation rather than on an interim appearance.

What happens between visits

The scheduled appointments are not the only points of contact, and it is worth being explicit about that, because patients sometimes wait for the next one when they should not.

Anything that worsens rather than improves, anything appearing suddenly after a settled period, and anything involving increasing pain, heat, redness or discharge is a reason to make contact when it happens.

Between the earlier visits especially, the gap can feel long relative to how quickly things are changing. Being unsure is a reason to ask rather than a reason to wait, and an appointment brought forward costs less than a finding left.

What the schedule assumes about you

The six visits assume you can attend them, and for patients travelling from abroad that assumption does not hold in the same way.

The earlier appointments fall within a typical stay — packing at day 2, suture removal at day 14 for cases using ear or autologous rib cartilage, with a recommended stay of around 7 to 10 days and sutures often removed at around 5 to 7 days where the schedule requires it. The later ones — one month, three months, six months — fall after most international patients have gone home.

How that is handled, and what a follow-up schedule looks like when you live overseas, is set out in the page on follow-up from abroad. It is worth raising before surgery rather than after, because it affects how the operation is planned as well as how the visits are arranged.

What each finding is compared against

An appointment is not a reading taken in isolation. Almost everything useful at a follow-up comes from comparison, and there are three things each finding is compared against.

The nose before the operation. The pre-operative examination and the 3D CT imaging describe what was there at the start — skin thickness, cartilage strength, septal quantity, the internal airway. A nose that was thick-skinned before surgery is expected to hold swelling at the tip for longer than one that was not, and the same finding at three months therefore means different things in the two cases.

The operation that was performed. What was done, which material was used, where the framework is supported and how it was fixed — all of this sets the expected trajectory. Swelling that persists over a region where a graft sits is read differently from swelling in a region that was not touched.

The previous appointment. This is the comparison that does most of the work, and it is the reason the appointments are worth attending in sequence rather than selectively. A tip that is firm at one month and softer at three months is following the expected direction. The same tip described only at three months, with nothing to compare it to, is simply a tip that is somewhat firm.

It is also why an examination and a photograph are not interchangeable. Lighting, angle, distance and time of day all move how a healing nose photographs, and a series of images taken in different conditions can suggest a change that an examination does not find, or conceal one that it does.

What is written down, and why it matters later

Each appointment produces a record: what was examined, what was found, what was said, and what was decided. It reads as administration. It is closer to the substance of the schedule than to its paperwork.

The reason is that a nose is judged on its trajectory, and a trajectory cannot be reconstructed from memory. At six months the assessment rests on how the nose moved through the preceding five appointments, not on how it appears on that day alone. Without the intervening record, the six-month examination is a first impression of a nose that happens to be six months old.

The record also has a life beyond the schedule. Any later conversation — about a concern that appears in the second year, about whether something has changed, about whether a further procedure is warranted — is a different conversation when it can be held against documented findings rather than against recollection. Patients who arrive for a revision without records from a previous operation know what the absence costs; that situation is described in the page on being diagnosed without records. The follow-up schedule is, among other things, how that absence is prevented.

Why six is a standard rather than a fixed list

The six points describe an uncomplicated course. They are not a quota, and two departures from them are ordinary.

Appointments are added. Where a finding needs to be watched at a shorter interval than the schedule provides, an extra appointment is arranged for that purpose rather than deferred to the next scheduled one. This is a normal use of the schedule and not a signal that something has gone wrong.

Appointments are moved. The later intervals have tolerance built into them. A three-month appointment attended at fourteen weeks reads much the same as one attended at twelve, because the phase it samples changes over weeks. The early cluster does not have that tolerance: day 1, day 5 and the two-week point sit where they do because findings are changing daily, and moving them by several days genuinely changes what can be seen.

That difference is the practical guidance for anyone who has to miss one. A missed later appointment is rescheduled without much consequence. A missed early one is worth replacing as close to its original date as possible, because it is not sampling the same nose a week later.

About the medical reviewer

Dae-hee Han, MD — Board-Certified Plastic Surgeon (specialist certificate No. 2045, issued 3 March 2014; medical licence 00394, issued 26 February 2009). Master’s degree, Ajou University School of Medicine. Training at the Craniofacial Center, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan (2013), and the IFAAS Mini Fellowship, University of Florida, USA (2016). Three rhinoplasty papers published in SCIE-indexed international journals. More than 4,500 nose surgeries — Dr. Han’s career total from 2017 to 2025, counted from medical records. He carries out consultation, surgery and follow-up personally; fee guidance is given by the clinic’s consultation manager.

Last reviewed: 2026-08-15

Clinic information

Edition Plastic Surgery Clinic & Dermatology
6F, OPUS 407, 407 Gangnam-daero, Seocho-gu, Seoul 06614, Republic of Korea
One minute on foot from Gangnam Station Exit 10
Tel +82-2-591-0100 · editionprs@gmail.com
Consultation hours: Monday to Friday 10:00–19:00 · Saturday 10:00–17:00 · closed Sundays and public holidays

Disclaimer

Individual results may vary. Bleeding, infection, swelling, asymmetry, and scarring can occur. Please decide after a full consultation with a board-certified specialist.

This page is general medical information. It is not a diagnosis, and it does not promise a particular outcome. Surgical fees are given after an in-person consultation.