do not go to Dr. Kenneth Wolf for top surgery
I went to him because he was 1.) the cheapest possible option and since I needed crowdfunding that seemed best 2.) within driving distance of my friends who’d be able to host me. I didn’t have any complications and I don’t hate my results, so the fact that he stopped offering free revisions after COVID (including for people who had their surgeries before the pandemic) and ghosts everyone isn’t a huge deal personally. I do have moderate to severe dog-earring right in the middle my chest which limits what clothing I can wear and have inquired about possible revisions with other surgeons (so far no one has been willing to operate on other dr’s work and have told me I’d need to pay the price of a full secondary top surgery). Dr. Wolf famously ghosts all his patients after surgery and has strict weight limits.
HOWEVER I accompanied my friend to their top surgery at the University of Michigan last year that made Dr. Wolf’s entire process seem back alley and sketchy by comparison. My friend had extensive pre- and post-surgical monitoring and extreme sanitary precautions. Dr. Wolf just had me take off my shirt and slapped me on the operation table still wearing my street clothes and then scraped me up and sent me home the moment I regained consciousness. His bedside manner was offputting and uncomfortable. It has been impossible to contact him ever since, even to ask politely why my stitches look so different from his other results. Other people with much worse results have also been ghosted.
OH AND ALSO when I asked if he could swap my left and right nipples just for the hell of it he said “yeah sure lol” but apparently you’re not supposed to do that because there is the risk of like, manually metastasizing cancer cells. lol. I did ask for it and I think I am at very low risk for breast cancer but I do think a responsible surgeon should at least know about and warn you of that possibility before agreeing to it.
my friends and my ex were great caretakers who made the recovery process easy and kind of fun but knowing what I know now makes the whole experience retroactively a little bit traumatic
An additional anecdote: My roommate got top surgery with this guy during our freshman year of college, and he had no family or other friends in the area to accompany him. On any normal day I would've skipped class to do so, but I had a quiz worth like a fifth of my grade and not enough advance warning to ask if I could take the alternate time (my roommate told me about this literally the morning of).
Dr. Wolf operated on an unaccompanied patient and let him get in a Lyft by himself immediately post-surgery.
A week or so he had to go back in to deal with a minor complication, and wanted to go by himself again. So I emailed Dr. Wolf to ask if I should push back and insist on coming with this time, and got this reply:
We always feel safer for the patient to have somebody with him. If it was the hospital, they would refuse to even do him without somebody with him.
I guess it technically beats operating on him alone a second time, but straight-up admitting that a hospital would never do the kind of thing he does is... telling, I think.
wow yeah I don’t love that
he seems to have been a lot more communicative in the past when he offered revisions but I don’t know if his other policies used to be better
also correction: there was a one week follow up appointment where he changed the bandages and told me it looked fine but there was no other communication after that. also he used penrose drains which I didn’t personally mind but was a lot grosser for my caretakers because it meant I was just oozing directly into my bandages, soaking through them, and staining clothes/bedding.
