I Spent a Week as My Friend’s Facelift Nurse. Here’s What No One Tells You.

18.06.2026, 02:01 allure.com

Over the last few years, four friends have asked me to escort them home after a surgical procedure. My designated-adult resume includes two colonoscopies, one blepharoplasty, and one IVF egg retrieval. I take pride in this role. It must mean I’m a responsible, dependable person. Or that I have too much free time.

Regardless, it’s always been a simple favor, typically just requiring me to pick up the friend at the doctor’s office, order an Uber, and make sure they get into their apartment safely. Thanks to Capsule’s delivery service in my hometown of New York City, I’m not even on the hook to do a pharmacy run.

But recently, I volunteered to help one of my closest friends, Robin, recover from a deep-plane face and neck lift, which meant being by her side for an entire week. It also meant flying down to Palm Beach, Florida from New York City (on her dime) since that’s where her chosen physician, facial plastic surgeon Mark R. Murphy, MD, practices.

My nerves are pretty steely, but I was anxious about seeing Robin in the immediate aftermath of this major surgery. Would it be gross? Disturbing? Would she be in agony? I remember the Italian mother of a high school classmate of mine referring to the “sympathy pains” she could feel when one of her kids was sick or hurt. She wasn’t being melodramatic. According to an article in Nature Reviews Psychology, seeing others in pain often recruits the same brain systems as feeling pain ourselves, and can be distressing, especially for highly empathetic people.

Lucky for Robin, my allegiance to her as a friend and my curiosity trumped my fear—and my empathy. I wanted to be there for her, of course, but I also wondered how witnessing her recovery at such close range would impact my own temptation (one way or the other) to eventually go under the knife. On that front, I’ve long been in the “maybe someday” camp—I’m just not there yet. And at 55, I’m eight years older than Robin.

In the days leading up to the surgery, I burrowed into an Instagram rabbit hole of facelift journeys. There are plenty to choose from, but like all things on social media, I couldn’t be sure how much of what I was watching was real. Once the algorithm kicked in, I was served an infinite scroll of videos from women who’d had facelifts all over the world, from Beverly Hills to Istanbul.

I also joined an Instagram Broadcast Channel called The Aesthetic Authority created by actor-DJ-trainer Emily Wagner, who’d had a lineup of procedures—it’s never just a facelift, I discovered—similar to the one Robin had planned. She was chronicling every step of her recovery and what I saw wigged me out a little—specifically, the facial swelling. I wasn’t alone. Emily, who approached the healing process like she was hosting a comedy roast of her own face, told me one of her friends temporarily muted her on social media to avoid seeing the no-holds-barred reveal unfurl.

Nevertheless, I remained committed to my caretaking duties and was shocked by how many surprises were still in store after all of my research. Here are the 10 no one tells you (or certainly didn’t tell me).

Facelift price tags range wildly. Steven Levine, MD, the New York City surgeon who performed perhaps the most famous facelift in history last year (yes, Kris Jenner’s) is now reportedly commanding $400,000. That number also happens to be the median cost of buying a home in America. More—way more—realistically, an experienced, sought-after plastic surgeon in the US will charge $40-50,000 for a facelift (including anesthesia and OR fees, but without common add-on procedures, such as a brow lift, lip lift, blepharoplasty, and fat transfer). If you travel to a cosmetic tourism destination, such as South Korea or Turkey, you can expect to pay more like $20-35,000 for a facelift—but the price savings comes with a whole other set of considerations and risk management.

And even if you don’t hop on an international flight, there are many ancillary costs to factor in. Before she ever got near an OR, my very thorough friend did 13 consultations with doctors in New York, Florida, Texas and Los Angeles, plus Zoom consultations with surgeons in South Korea and Turkey. And while that’s excessive, Julie, another woman I know in her late 40s who recently had a facelift, did four. At $250 to $1,000 a pop, those meetings can add up fast. (The fee gets applied to the surgery, if you decide to move forward).

Ultimately, Robin chose Dr. Murphy based on a constellation of factors: his natural aesthetic, his 25 years of experience, his bedside manner (a big one), his pricing, and his recovery plan. "I met with a wide range of surgeons, including some of the now-famous ones such as Dr. Ben Talei [Denise Richards’ plastic surgeon] and Dr. Steven Levine, who charge top dollar,” says Robin, who writes the no-BS, all-transparency beauty Substack Charlotte’s Book. “I liked Dr. Talei a lot, but his price point was too hard for me to justify, although I tried. Dr. Levine was also extremely expensive, and the consultation was about 15 minutes, which was a bit unacceptable to me given the price tag. For something this major involving my face, I needed more time and personal connection than that. A lot of people only focus on the before-and-afters, but I wasn't doing this unless I felt completely confident and comfortable with not just the results but the person behind them. With Dr. Murphy everything just clicked. It was a very clear yes."

Post-surgery, all reputable surgeons require you to have a nurse for a minimum of 18-24 hours (at $100-$200 per hour) to ensure that you're safe, comfortable, taking crucial medication, and doing the proper icing. For Dr. Murphy’s patients, that means 20 minutes on, 20 minutes off for the first 18 hours using a full ice mask (smaller ice packs are used for more targeted areas, if needed). On day two, the icing schedule is 20 minutes on, 40 minutes off during waking hours and by day three, icing can typically be stopped.

Unless you live around the corner from the surgical suite or hospital, you’ll probably be spending a couple of nights in a nearby hotel. Robin checked into hers the day before her surgery. She originally booked the room for three nights and her nurse for 39 hours, but ended up adding an additional night for a grand total cost of $6,400. (I subbed in for 12 hours before the third post-surgery sleepover, while her nurse was at work.) “I was a very scared patient, so I wanted the first 48 hours of aftercare to be meticulous,” says Robin, who tacked on the extra night because she didn’t feel quite ready to move locations. “My nurse iced me like clockwork. It’s not something I could have done as consistently by myself, and it’s too much to put on a friend.”

The last ice mask, on the morning of day three.

Recovery add-ons can ratchet things up, too, depending on how zealous you are. Robin took a super minimalistic approach and focused purely on getting as much rest as she could and, she says, “not effing anything up.” Emily sprung for 10 hyperbaric oxygen therapy sessions, which she did every other day following her surgery. At $2,500 for the package, that added some serious coin to the tab—but, Emily told me, “I believe it sped up my healing.”

But all the recovery bells and whistles—many not exactly proven—don’t necessarily mean better results. “Social media makes recovery look like a checklist of biohacks, but my philosophy is less is more, especially in the first two weeks,” says New York facial plastic surgeon Eunice Park, MD. “The priority is protecting incisions, minimizing inflammation, and allowing tissues to re-establish blood supply.”

While you can find some small studies that show faster healing with hyperbaric oxygen therapy, both Dr. Murphy and Dr. Park only consider it on a case-by-case basis— for example, when incisions are not healing properly—not as a blanket recommendation. It is still a medical treatment with risks, such as ear or sinus trauma caused by pressure changes, oxygen toxicity that can provoke seizures (rare, but documented), temporary vision changes and exposure to infection; Remember, people go hyperbaric chambers to heal all kinds of wounds. One thing they do often recommend is carefully timed lymphatic massage, done at their offices, to help with swelling. We’re not talking about full-on lymphatic drainage facials— just some gentle manipulation done by the surgeon themselves to get things moving.

Plastic surgeons may as well be board-certified in psychiatry because they have to play shrink alongside surgeon. “The emotional roller coaster is real—and honestly, it’s more than half the battle for many patients,” says Dr. Murphy, who cites misleading information patients find online as one common fear-heightening factor. “We spend significant time explaining what to expect—there will be ups and downs. That’s vital. I also give patients my personal cell number to call or text with questions or concerns—and many use it. But even just knowing they have that safety net dramatically reduces anxiety.”

By her own admission, Robin is an anxious over-analyzer so she was happy I bunked with her well beyond the advised minimum of 72 hours post-surgery. My job was grocery shopping, tracking meds (an oral steroid and antibiotic, plus pain and anti-anxiety prescriptions), applying ointment to her sutures once a day, and bringing her to her first five post-op appointments (driving week one is a no-no.) But I also provided some much-needed reality checks, like when she began obsessing over looking like an alien, her head shaped like an inverted pear. This was around day five or six when her upper face swelling wasn’t going down at the same rate as her lower face. I assured her that it would even out (it did) and that she already looked amazing, like a bouncy-faced 30-something-year-old (she did).

The “alien head” phase, days five and six.

"It was so helpful to have a friend to distract me—we chatted a lot and watched a ton of Sc