Losing a Nostril to Cancer Shook Her Confidence. Then She Dropped 52 Lbs. and Got a Facelift to Feel 'Sexy Again' (Exclusive)

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This year has been all about goals for Susan.

The mom and former flight attendant, 62, wanted to lose weight ahead of her daughter’s October wedding. Then she wanted to dabble in some plastic surgery to give her face a more youthful look and further repair some damage left by a bout of skin cancer.

Ultimately, her goal was to “feel sexy again” and look her best for her daughter’s big day.

Susan’s transformation started when she met with Dr. Anthony Youn, a holistic plastic surgeon based in Michigan, a few years ago. After being diagnosed with skin cancer, Susan ultimately lost a nostril to the disease and was seeking help for reconstructive surgery to fix it. While meeting with him, she also inquired about an overall rejuvenation for her look. However, she walked away from that appointment because it wasn’t the right time for a facelift, she says, not realizing she’d eventually be back to see him. She tells PEOPLE that that appointment was more about “dipping a toe in” to “test the water” for eventual plastic surgery.

(In the meantime, she did get reconstructive surgery to repair her nose.)

Fast-forward to last year, when her daughter got engaged. This put Susan back onto her path for transformation. Her first order of business was to shed a few pounds.

“My daughter got engaged in August [2024], and this was it,” she says of wanting to make a change. “I thought, ‘Enough is enough.’ So then that’s when I started losing the weight and got in with Dr. Youn again.”

Susan lost around 20 pounds before seeing him again at the beginning of 2025, and she told him she planned to lose more ahead of the wedding. As part of her transformation, she was hoping for a facelift under his care.

Dr. Youn candidly told her, though, that she needed to lose the weight first so that her surgery would have optimal success.

“Usually, what I tell patients is ideally you want to get within about five to 10 pounds away from a reasonably healthy weight that you can maintain,” Dr. Youn explains to PEOPLE. “The idea is that you don’t want to lose a bunch of weight after surgery because if you do, then the skin can sag again. But you also don’t want to gain a bunch of weight, because then you may feel that things don’t have the contours that you’re looking for.”

Dr. Youn scheduled Susan’s surgery, which she got when she was 61 years old, for July — well enough ahead of her daughter’s October wedding, just in case there were any complications, bruising or excess swelling. Plus, this gave her time to lose the additional weight she was after. She tells PEOPLE she ended up losing 52 pounds.

For her four-and-a-half-hour procedure, Dr. Youn performed a lower facelift (which includes the neck) and a lower blepharoplasty. He explains that the technique he used for the facelift is SMAS (Superficial Muscular Aponeurotic System), rather than deep-plane, which is currently quite popular.

“When I do my surgery, the goal is all about doing the least invasive procedures necessary to get a patient happy with how they are,” he explains, adding that a SMAS procedure is typically lower risk than other techniques with fewer opportunities for complications. With this technique, the surgeon isn’t going as deeply under the skin to tighten as one would with a deep-plane facelift. Deep-plane procedures can often be used in more severe cases because they tighten from down in the muscles and ligaments.

For the lower bleph, which Susan wanted to address puffiness and dark circles, Dr. Youn describes two ways he could have gone about it and what he ended up doing.

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“There’s called a pinch lower blepharoplasty, where you remove fat but also some skin with it. And then there’s a transconjunctival or what we call ‘scarless,’ where we do it without removing skin, and then there’s no visible scar afterwards,” he tells PEOPLE. “She has a history of dry eyes, so because of that, we wanted to be conservative with her. We talked about just removing the fat and not removing any skin with it. That’s the transconjunctival or the scarless blepharoplasty.”

Susan’s surgery went according to plan, as did her recovery, she and Dr. Youn share. The only slight hiccup she says she faced was a tenderness around her ears afterward.

The mother-of-the-bride felt confident throughout her daughter’s wedding festivities, thanks to her new look. She says it brought back a piece of herself she’d been missing.

“I just wanted to be who I used to be and feel the way I used to feel. Get my confidence back,” she says of what she told herself to stay motivated during the weight loss and when she was trying to be “brave” for surgery. “In life, you have to have things that you look forward to. You have to have goals. I mean, even if it is you go to work, you have something that you are accomplishing weekly. Now I have a whole new set of things that I want to do because of feeling like I’m myself again, which had been probably missing for about… I want to say 15 years.”

The feedback from those in her life since her plastic surgery has been great, Susan shares. Her daughters were supportive throughout her journey, only wanting their mom to be happy and healthy. Susan has also now come to learn that plastic surgery isn’t quite the taboo topic in her friend circles that she originally thought. She’s even influenced some of her friends to look into plastic surgery for themselves after seeing how much happier Susan is.

“I’m ecstatic,” she shares. “I wanted to feel sexy again, and I do. I feel pretty good about myself. This was something for me.”