Winston Crookendale sees a woman with a double chin and immediately visualises the results of “a little liposuction and maybe a little tuck” on that face.
Through many years of nipping, tucking and reconstructing parts of the body, this plastic surgeon has developed a keen eye for how the physical appearance can be improved, and spirits lifted as a result.
Early in the morning on one of the two days he works in his Pine Hill office seeing patients, he talked to EASY magazine about a rewarding career spanning about four decades.
“I have put in the time,” Crookendale said, and there is no doubt he has distinguished himself in the area of reconstructive surgery.
In medical school he was first up, eager to dissect a cadaver.
Respected senior medical colleagues tried unsuccessfully to influence the young Crookendale to pursue specialties such as heart surgery and paediatrics, but he liked “plastics”. *
Though he already had a Fellowship in General Surgery in Edinburgh, Scotland, under his belt, he would not be swayed. “I said there is a whole bunch of young, bright guys and girls coming behind me and doing general surgery. Ten years from now we will all be fighting to do the same hernia and the same gall bladder. I need my own thing.”
He made it into a plastic surgeon’s programme at McMaster University in Ontario “at the 11th hour”.
Crookendale returned to Barbados, which had no resident plastic surgeon in 1981, he still found there was no position for a plastic surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. He settled for working both as a general surgeon and plastic surgeon for a number of years, before becoming a consultant in general surgery and officially the plastic surgeon he wanted to be. It was “a busy, busy life.”
“I came back and every hair lip, every cleft palette, every major burn, every major hand injury, facial injuries – you name it, I am the one doing them all.”
He was in his 30s when he found himself pressed into doing one of his earliest major reconstructive surgeries – reattaching several fingers severed in an industrial accident.
It was one of his most challenging assignments – twelve uninterrupted hours of operating down a microscope performing microvascular surgery to give back to a young girl four of the eight fingers she had just lost in a punch press.
“I sat down at six o clock the evening to see how many I could put back on and I managed to put back two on one hand, two on the other – two arteries and a couple of veins to each finger and you are talking about vessels only slightly bigger than the hair on your head.” When he was finally able to raise his head, it was daylight of the next day.
The satisfaction was: “I was doing the kind of thing I always knew I would want to do.”
Why medicine? “Ask all the earthworms and frogs in my backyard in the sixties,” he said, laughing. “I did science at Harrison College. I was not a particularly good student; I did not like studying; I did not particularly like books, but I liked doing things with my hands. So when it was time to dissect a frog or an earthworm, I came into my own.”
With a tinge of sadness he reflected on that period when Kay, his late wife of 35 years, took up the slack at home, looking after their children in the long hours when he could not be there.
His advice to young professionals: “Choose wisely when it comes to choosing a partner.”
“God was good and I had a good wife who covered for me, looked after the children and did an amazing job of raising them, because I was so busy.”
At this stage, this grandfather now paces himself, though still devoting time to the profession he loves. There is time for recreation – hiking, photography and dance classes as ballroom dancing has become “almost an obsession”.
“No matter how down I feel, when I go and get absorbed in trying to get the steps right, there is a relaxation . . . a peace.”
“I like the fact that every time you do a rumba there is something you want to tweak to get right. I like the fact that it is always challenging my mind. Of course, there is a physical aspect to it as well.”
Behind him are those years when, through his networking with other surgeons abroad, he reshaped misshapen skulls. “We had to literally take the skull and the face apart and fix them right and we did a lot of those and we had great results.”
But he has stepped back, leaving that kind of work for “the younger person in the market”.
“I don’t want to do that anymore” he says, “I am getting to the point now where I want to be selective. I am getting to the point where emotionally I can’t handle a bad result.”
“I can still do a six or eight-hour procedure and walk out on my two feet but if a wound does not heal right or a person gets an embolism, the younger surgeon may take it as par for the course. As this stage of the game I don’t take it as par for the course. The slightest complication, I fuss, I fret, I want to quit.”
The other day when he saw the post-op results of a facelift he had done on a female patient, his immediate exclamation was “Wow!”
He said to EASY: “I felt ‘good God, you have given me wonderful skills’. But by the same token if she had had a breakdown I would have been going out of my mind.”
“I don’t think people realise that apart from the cerebral and the physical, there is an emotional aspect to being a surgeon, and especially a reconstructive surgeon, where there is a lot of fine, fiddly, fussy stuff that consumes you,” he went on.
Reconstructing the female breast remains the procedure he enjoys most. “I still like doing stuff on the breast . . . . Drooping breasts – you lift them up, put an implant in to give them volume, which is one of the most satisfying things for me.”
He also likes doing tummy tucks. When conscientious workouts in the gym fail, women turn to him and he sets to work suctioning and tightening, restoring lost waistlines.
Men are also finding the plastic surgeon. Older male executives with drooping eyelids occasionally consult him for reconstructive surgery, sensitive about their look among young executives in the marketplace. There are a few men requesting facelifts, while others suffering from skin cancer are also turning to Crookendale for help.
He tells you he is at “interesting crossroads”, where he still enjoys what he does but is now more selective.