Before we talk about what happens inside a consultation room, I want to establish something important. The questions social media tells you to ask at a consultation — board certification, surgical facility accreditation, how many of these procedures they perform annually, before and after photos of patients with similar anatomy — those are not consultation questions.
They are pre-qualification questions. They belong in the research phase, long before a consultation date is ever set. When a woman works with me, those foundational questions are answered before she ever walks into a room. I have already vetted the surgeon. I already know they are board certified, credentialed and appropriate for her specific goals. She is not arriving at a consultation to run a checklist. She is arriving because the work before the consultation confirmed she is in the right place.
Our consultations are not scavenger hunts. And the women I work with do not waste time or money on appointments that should never have been scheduled. This is true whether they are seeing a surgeon in The Regan Surgical Collective™ or a surgeon they have found independently. Either way they arrive knowing. Either way the foundational work is done.
What I want to talk about now is what happens after all of that. Inside the consultation itself. The subtle things that signal something is not quite right — not about credentials, but about connection. Not about qualifications, but about fit. These are the red flags I have learned to recognize — not from a textbook, but from six years of debriefing consultations with women who walked out of them carrying something they could not quite put down.
She liked him. And she wanted me to know that first. She liked her surgeon. He was warm and confident and clearly skilled. The office was beautiful. The coordinator was lovely. And yet she drove home with something sitting in her chest that she could not name. It took her three days to figure out what it was.
She had questions she never asked. Not because she forgot them. Not because she ran out of time. But because somewhere in the momentum of the appointment — the presentation, the excitement, the surgical plan laid out so clearly and confidently in front of her — the questions she came in with quietly slipped away. They were never asked. They were never answered. They were left on the consultation room floor. And she signed a surgical date anyway.
How This Happens
A consultation with a skilled, confident surgeon has a natural momentum to it. There is a sequence. An evaluation. A recommendation. A presentation of what is possible. It is professional. It is polished. And for many women it is also subtly overwhelming — not in a way that feels alarming, but in a way that quietly crowds out the things they came in to say.
The surgeon is not doing anything wrong. They are doing exactly what they were trained to do — evaluate, recommend, plan. The momentum is not manipulation. It is expertise moving efficiently through a structured appointment. But efficiency and alignment are not the same thing.
A woman can leave a consultation with a surgical date, a pre-op appointment and a financing plan — and still have questions on the floor. Questions about what happens if the result is not what she expected. Questions about a specific concern she mentioned once and was not sure was heard. Questions she did not have the language to ask clearly enough to get a real answer. Nobody picked them up. Nobody handed them back to her. And nobody told her they were there.
What I Do About the Floor
Before any client of mine walks into a consultation, we work on what she is bringing into the room — not just the questions she has already thought of, but the ones she does not know to ask yet. And after she walks out, she calls me. I go through what happened in that room the way a detective goes through a scene. Not looking for problems — looking for anything that was not fully resolved.
Anything that got a general answer when it needed a specific one. Anything she left behind. When I find something — and I often do — I tell her the same thing every time. We have a few more questions before I can sleep at night. And then we go back and get them answered. Every single one. Before she agrees to anything.
The floor gets cleared. Always. Because the questions that go unanswered before surgery do not stay quiet. They just wait — and they choose the worst possible moment to make themselves known. You deserve to walk into surgery with nothing on the floor. That is what I make sure of.