Linda's goal was to tweak the changes that had occurred to her facial features due to aging. Although Carl, who is known industry- and Internet-wide for his age-reversing results, promised to make his mom look like she did the day he was born, Linda didn't want to look completely unrecognizable. "I was only 31 when he was born. I didn't want to go that far back. [Looking] 40 was good," she says.
It was this past fall when Linda underwent her first operation — a lip lift in tandem with an upper eyelid lift (also known as a blepharoplasty) — at the age of 68. Over the two-hour surgery, she was awake the whole time, though under a numbing local anesthesia. "I'm the type of person that wants to see it," she explains.
Linda healed from the procedures almost seamlessly, but she did encounter a slight hiccup after failing to listen to the "doctor's orders," some of which included avoiding salt and keeping her head elevated. Well, "one night I ate half a bag of kettle-cooked potato chips and I went to pick up something off the floor," she admits of how she ended up with swelling post-op. But that was pretty much the only complication she encountered and she was back to normal after about two weeks.
She waited around four months to undergo a deep-plane facelift to address her "drooping" neck, jowls and chin line.
The operation was completed in seven hours (she wasn't awake this time around, although she wishes she could've been) and Linda had minimal complications.
"I really expected more pain. There was just one area near my hairline where he did the upper brow lift that was tender. It felt like when you get your hair braided or get a weave, and they pulled too tight," she says, adding that it took some time to adjust to the numbing around her ear lobes. Overall, it only took five weeks for her to start feeling like herself again.
If you're wondering if Carl gave his mom a discount for all the work she had done? The answer is absolutely.
While Carl typically charges $60,000-$120,000 for full facial rejuvenations at his practice, Linda's procedures were 100 percent free. "What I paid was giving birth to Carl,"' she says with a laugh. "That was a gift to mom."
"How do you charge the woman who gave you life?" Carl tells PEOPLE:
Linda entrusted her son with her transformation so much that she didn't even get a second opinion. "If he could do any kind of surgery on me that I needed, I would go to Carl," she says, joking that she would get her hips done by Carl if she could.
However, "the time that I really had reservations was the night before the surgery," she admits, "and I'm thinking, okay, we're getting ready to do this thing, what if something happens to me? How is my son going to survive that? So I had some sleepless hours the night before, and just prayed about it. But, I believed that he could do this."
Carl tells PEOPLE that from his point of view, everything was a "whirlwind."
"Of course, every patient matters deeply to me, but there’s something unique about operating on your own mother. As I worked, I kept thinking, 'This is the person who gave me life,' and I found myself wondering if my anatomy mirrors hers. That said, I followed the same protocols I do for all my patients. The only difference? Instead of going home to recover, she healed in my back house — with her son checking in on her every step of the way."
As she approaches her 69th birthday, Linda is feeling as confident as ever. "I feel better when I look in the mirror," she says, "I was at Lowe's the other day, and this woman walked up to me and said, 'Oh my God, you have absolutely beautiful skin. What do you do?' It's just good to be able to make people feel good when they see you.'
