At the risk of sounding melodramatic, Dr. Calvert saved me! My saga started in high school when my nose was literally butchered by an inexperienced, overconfident surgeon. I was young, naive and a Middle Eastern girl with a very large nose in a white LA suburb that had low tolerance for ethnic differences & all I wanted was to fit in. The butcher left me with a little nub of a nose that collapsed w/in a year & left me unable to properly breathe. I was the walking poster child for a bad nose job. I did my research & found Dr. Sheen in Santa Barbara who ended up working on me 2x - he made my nose so large after the 1st time that he revised it w/in 2 mos. He used ear and rib grafts. In retrospect, while Dr. Sheen was a genius of his time, he was past his prime when I saw him. In the end, Dr. Jack Sheen helped. My nose looked less artificial and offensive.. for a good 2 to 3 years. It then collapsed too over time. The breathing slowly suffered too. 10 years later I decided I would give it one more crack..I researched/interviewed surgeons until I found Dr. Rollin Daniel in NPB. Dr. Daniel was never warm & lacked good bedside manners, but he gave me promise that I'd look and feel normal again. After my surgery (he too did ear/rib grafting), he left gortex partially exposed in my upper right gums... WTF! I got to pay nearly $2K for the surgery center and anesthesiologist to have Dr. Daniel to remove it... you may be thinking I am an idiot and should have sued him, but all I've wanted since my late teens was to look normal, and I have always felt like I have been at the mercy of these surgeons. I wasn't about to sue anyone. I did look a good deal better after my Dr. Daniel surgery, but within a few years... again, my nose collapsed and the breathing deteriorated rapidly. Before moving forward with Dr. Daniel, I had vowed to myself that this would be it.. one more time, I had found the best of the best and he was going to make me whole again. In my mind, it was this or never. And so even though I looked weird and unnatural again within a handful of years after the surgery, I was not going to do anything more about it. It was not meant to be and I had largely come to terms with that. Although in the back of my mind, I longed for normality. I was tired of being mistaken for Asian and being asked where I got my flat little nose from. Fast forward to after baby 3,... and now my breathing was worse than ever. So I decided, at 41, I was going to give it one more shot... not for the look but solely for the breathing. I truly loathed the idea of going back under the knife but at 41, I figured I had another 40 years to live like this and this was no way to live. I decided I was not going to ask for much to change aesthetic wise, fearing more damage would result. I was very apprehensive and skeptical that anyone could actually help me. A friend recommended Dr. C & I'm soooooo lucky she did. I remember our first meeting. He asked me something not one other surgeon, none that I interviewed and none that actually performed surgery on me, had ever bothered to ask... he asked me what would make me happy - not what I wanted my nose to look like or did I bring pictures of noses I like, but what would make me happy... wow,... it was so unexpected, and it hit me so deeply that I broke down, sobbing as I muttered, "To look normal again...For my girls to look at me and see themselves." Dr. C handed me tissue & I honestly think he chocked up too, & said, "We can do that." He was on a mission. We talked a lot about what that meant, the risks, best case, worst case, the breathing, which was critical to me, and more. Dr. C is amazing. I absolutely adore him, as my surgeon & respect him as a person. He's brilliant at his craft. And when I say he delivered.... that is an understatement. Dr. C hit a fucking home run with my nose. I look the way I should have after my first surgery. I've regained my true ethnic look but the version I wanted when I saw that butcher in high school. I LOVE my nose. I LOVE myself again... & I can breath. The breathing is not a 100% but my surgery was on 6/20 (less than 6 mos ago) there is still a good deal of swelling given what Dr. C had to do in there... oh yeah, what did he have to do... Well, Dr. Calvert expected it to be "neat and organized" in there given my last surgery was with Dr. Daniel, who is world renowned for rhino revisions. Dr. C had estimated it would take 3 to 3.5 hours for my surgery... it took 5.5 hours! Apparently it was a mess.. I had nothing holding my nose up... He had to rebuild everything.. this time it was rib, ear and scalp grafting. Yes, the recovery was not easy, and I hated every minute of it, from the moment I checked in... having been traumatized by so many bad surgeries & and results. But I am so happy I got the courage to do this one more time and even luckier to have found Dr. C. I am so very grateful to him, & believe he is happy for my new found happiness too. Thank you Dr. C! read more