Dr. Bae:
Thanks so much, Greg. Good to see you.

Greg:
Did I embarrass you? I hope not.

Dr. Bae:
I’m getting red, getting red.

Greg:
Your hair’s getting longer, by the way, again. Are you doing the COVID thing and not cutting it again, or what’s going on over there?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, letting it grow out. According to my wife and the person who cuts my hair, Kristin at Monument Salon, shout out to Kristin, they both like my hair a little long, kind of like Oscar Isaac. That was actually the actor that they said they wanted my hair to look like.

Greg:
Hey listen, first of all, the two people you should be listening to in life, your wife, number one, and the person that does your hair, number two. So good choice.

Dr. Bae:
Thanks.

Why Dr. Bae cancelled his trip to Hawaii

Greg:
But the reason I bring it up is, we were kind of full steam, speed ahead, taking our masks off, going out, doing all these things because we kind of thought we had this COVID thing beat, but the Delta variant has thrown a little bit of a curve ball at us, and we’re all kind of coming back. I know me, I washed all my masks, got them in my car, got them in my backpack again. And then I know you just made a major decision about traveling. You were about to take a big trip to Hawaii and you’ve made a decision to not go?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, if y’all remember, on Big Bay Mornings, I actually invited everybody to come join us in Hawaii and Maui at the end of August, and-

Greg:
I was going to be your nanny. I was going to take care of the baby and then y’all could hang out.

Dr. Bae:
Exactly. Well, yeah, we were excited to have you as our nanny, but we decided to not go because… And I want to make it clear to everybody that we’re making decisions based on specific situation in our life that this doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else has to do the same. But if it was just me and Kelsey, two adults that were vaccinated, I would’ve still gone to Hawaii at the end of the month. No question about it. Even with the Delta variant, even though it’s more infectious and things like that. We would’ve been vaccinated, we would’ve worn N95 masks on the plane. I felt like we would’ve been pretty safe.

Kids under 12 unvaccinated

Dr. Bae:
But because we were going to be traveling with a six and a half month old, or a seven month old by that time, who’s not eligible for the vaccine, who wouldn’t be vaccinated by then, we felt like we needed to cancel the trip. And we reached out to the hotel and just said, “You know what? We’re coming there, we promise. Keep our money, we’re not asking for a refund. Hopefully we’ll be there within the next six months.” And so yeah, we canceled the trip to Hawaii and we’ll just do a little staycation here. But I think the issue was just that, because Emilio isn’t vaccinated yet and being in closed quarters for a five-hour flight, it was just too much anxiety. Because the truth is, he’s a perfectly healthy little boy, and if he got sick, and I know it’s rare that kids get really sick from COVID, but… It’s rare, that doesn’t mean it’s zero. And if he did actually get sick-

Greg:
Yeah. Well, and a baby can’t even wear a mask, right?

Dr. Bae:
That’s the whole thing, yeah, they talk about… Well, the baby’s not required to wear a mask, but I think it’d be pretty tough and maybe a little scary if it-

Greg:
I mean, how would you put a… Yeah, I don’t even know how you would do it.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, and you’d be afraid that it would smother the baby. Yeah, that’d be a bad scene. So we just didn’t want to take the chance of this perfectly healthy little boy getting potentially sick and getting a rare, serious case of COVID. So yeah, we canceled the trip. We’ll hang out here. We’ll be able to travel there again. We’re just going to stay home, stay healthy. And since we’re requiring all of our patients coming into the office now to be vaccinated, we’re hopefully going to keep the Delta variant at bay, keep our own little herd immunity here in the office and that way I won’t take it-

Greg:
At bay. At Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Oh yeah, at Bae. Yeah, there you go, B-A-E.

Greg:
Hey, even though you did cancel your trip and you did it because of your baby, but you said you would’ve gone had-

Dr. Bae:
I would’ve.

How to travel safely

Greg:
… you weren’t taking the baby. You do still think there are safe ways people can travel, but you would definitely recommend, I mean, maybe the best mask possible. What is that, the N95?

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s… Nothing’s going to be a hundred percent safe. It’s about risk mitigation, risk reduction. And I think that if you’re traveling by car to someplace up in Napa and you’re going to be at a hotel that’s got, basically outdoor, that you don’t have to go into a lobby to go into your room, that you have a direct entrance into your room, if there’s little bungalows and things, I think that’s super safe to do that. I think you’re outdoors, you’re not going into a crowded area. If you’re able to eat outdoors, I think that’s as safe as you can be without completely shutting everything down. And yeah, N95 masks definitely are going to be better than just a regular cloth mask. So I think there’s definitely safer ways to travel and that’s what I would encourage people to do, and that’s what we’re… We’re following my own advice.

Greg:
Awesome. Well, I mean, listen, we’ve got to live life, but we also can make smart decisions and smart choices to keep ourselves safe and everybody else safe.

Dr. Bae:
Right. We want to live life, but we want to be alive to live life.

Greg:
There you go.

Dr. Bae:
Yeah, so make some good choices. There you go.

How to find Dr. Bae

Greg:
That’s great advice. And if you need any other advice from Dr. Bae, whether it’s about COVID, or maybe you want to book a plastic surgery appointment, or maybe you need a consultation for something and just want to ask him a question, he will answer anything that you want to ask at…

Dr. Bae:
Realdrbae, R-E-A-L-D-R-B-A-E on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. You can direct message us on any of those. You can watch us operate on social media, and you can also check pricing on our website at realdrbae.com. Always available.

Greg:
Great to see you, Dr. Bae.

Dr. Bae:
Great to see you, Greg.

The post Why I canceled my trip to Hawaii [video] first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.

Data shows vaccine is safe

To achieve herd immunity, we need 50-60% of Americans to get the vaccine. That translates into 200 million of us. For that to happen, we need to ensure folks it’s safe. Based on the data, the vaccine is safe. In an effort to educate the public regarding the vaccine’s safety profile, we have to highlight some of the concerns out there.

Alcohol and the vaccine

And in the process of highlighting concerns, we may inadvertently bring attention to, and give credence to myths that we want to dispel. For example, alcohol consumption. There’s a concern that a COVID vaccine in Russia may have a bad reaction when the consumer drinks alcohol within weeks of receiving it.

There is no evidence that if you drink alcohol, you will have a bad reaction to the vaccine. The only possible underlying validity to this is the possibility that if you consume a great deal of alcohol in general, this may affect your overall health and lead to a weakened immune system. But other than that, there is no direct correlation between the occasional drink or even a social drinker having a reaction to the vaccine because of their alcohol consumption.

Allergic reactions to the vaccine

Soon after the UK began distributing the Pfizer vaccine, there were reports of allergic reactions. While allergic reactions are possible, three things are critically important to know. First, reactions can occur with all vaccines. Second, the reaction isn’t necessarily due to the active ingredients in the vaccine themselves. They may be from the solution or preservatives in the vaccine. For example, when receiving the typical flu vaccine, the person administering the injection may tell you that a reaction is possible if you already have an allergy to eggs. And third, the people reported to have had allergic reactions were already highly susceptible to allergic reactions in general. How do we know this? Because they were already carrying epi pens! That means, for the large majority of vaccine recipients, a severe allergic reaction is not a major risk.

Bell’s palsy and the vaccine

In a review of Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA noted that 4 people got Bell’s palsy during the vaccine trials. While no one in the placebo group during the trial got Bell’s palsy, the FDA noted that this is similar to the number of people that will get Bell’s palsy in the general population, completely unrelated to the vaccine or vaccine trials. In other words, even if those people weren’t in the vaccine trials or received the vaccine, they would have the same probability of getting Bell’s palsy.

As more people receive the vaccine, we may learn of other reactions or side effects. But for now, the vaccine appears safe and the best option we have to return to a life of vacations and human interactions without masks.

Click here for the original blog post written by Dr. Kaplan for BuildMyBod.

The post The vaccine is near! The vaccine is safe! first appeared on Plastic Surgeon San Francisco | Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery.