My doctor

In august 2022 I had my nose operation with Hasan Emre Koçak (pronounced Co-jack) in Istanbul, Turkey. I chose him because he had a lot of good reviews and a person I know had gone to him and was very happy and had really natural results.

It was extremely hard choosing a doctor because of the stories of doctors just making the nose THEY want instead of what YOU want and people being super unhappy. Also because nose surgery is so hard, I have heard numbers such as that the success rate of nose surgery is even down to 60%. I know a part of that is because many people don't realize it can take up to 18 months for the nose to get its final look, the swelling easily takes 6-12 months to go down so people sometimes rush into revisions too early.

And with each revision the case becomes much harder so the price for revisions is insane in many cases, because it's so much harder to do a revision than a primary operation in many cases.

So sometimes you get stuck in a cycle of operations because you are unhappy with the first and the more you have, the more likely you will have bad results. And even if the nose looks great, the breathing may be affected or even lost completely.

So I knew I had to choose well so that I wouldn't need a revision and whatever nose I would come out with, I would need to accept it.

When you choose a doctor you may notice that their noses on their Instagram look very much alike, they have a style of nose. They are used to making this type of nose so you should know that no matter what you ask for, your nose might end up in that style.

My choices

I ended up considering 2 doctors, Dr. Hasan Emre Koçak and Dr. Ali Evlice, they both made noses that I really liked and had very similar nose styles to each other, Dr. Evlice does a closed operation but Dr. Koçak makes a open one. Dr. Koçak's price for primary was 3500 euros but for Dr. Evlice it was 6000 euros.

The pro's of a closed operation is that there should be less swelling after surgery but on the other hand a closed operation is much harder so it requires more skill but also more chances of something going wrong. So despite maybe getting more swollen I felt that I had a better chance of success with an open operation, especially since my nose was so crooked.

Their results seemed very much the same, didn't feel like Dr. Evlice had 2x better results but his price was almost 2x higher.

Additionally I knew a person who had personally gone to Dr. Koçak and was super happy with him, his staff and the results.

So then the choice was easy, it was Dr. Koçak.

And I did choose the right one because I got great results, great healing and just everything is exactly like it should be! :) 

This is his instagrams: https://www.instagram.com/doc.dr.emrekocak/ 
& https://www.instagram.com/burun_estetigi/ 

This is his webpage: https://www.hasanemrekocak.com/ 

The conversation in Whatsapp:

I spoke to Dr.Koçak and his staff through his Whatsapp +90 530 170 31 77 (for English) and I didn't always know if he or his staff was answering but I did usually get the answers I needed.

What I wanted done:

• Straight nose
• Remove hump
• More defined tip

And they said he could do all of that.

The only questions they did not answer was if they could:

• Change the tip to not be so big
• If it was easy to fix crooked nose (they made it sound like it was)

but they did answer everything else so everything was good.

Maybe they couldn't answer these until he saw the nose in real life?

I asked if he did other plastic surgery that could be performed at the same time since I was already under.

I found out that he also does Blepharoplasty, Bichectomy and Chin implant but when I asked about the price for Blepharoplasty it was more expensive than in my home country (1500 euros) and I know I can get the Blepharoplasty in my home country under local anesthesia so I would rather he just focus on my nose for the operation for best chance of good results.

He asked what month I wanted and I said august. He then offered me dates for examination and surgery and I confirmed I would like that date, then he asked me to confirm by purchasing a flight asap and showing him proof of that, then the date is reserved for me.

I expected that he would have a deposit fee to reserve the date so I felt it was a bit strange that I was forced to buy flight tickets to reserve, like I might want to wait until a airline has offers going on.

But on the other hand that is of course the most sure way of making sure the patient actually arrives, it must be a lot of risk relying on a lot of foreign patients that may cancel the last moment.

But I like to have things ready, so I just booked the flight with Turkish Airlines, sent him a screenshot of the flights and he reserved the date.

He said that it was enough to arrive 1 day before the examination and then stay for 8 nights in total. That I would stay 1 night at the hospital after surgery. 

We ended up thinking that we wanted to make sure we were there early in case there were cancellation in flights (that has been happening since Covid hit) and stay some extra days in case there would be any complications after the surgery, plus maybe we could use some days to shop or just have a little holiday so the flights we ended up with was staying 14 days.

Originally we needed a covid test before our flight and I think before our surgery but shortly before I asked again (especially since I may not be able to use the same covid test for the flight and the surgery since I was arriving 3 or 4 days before surgery) and restrictions had been lifted so there were no tests needed for the flight or the surgery then.

From Hasan Emre Koçak's webpage
You can see his office and history here