Lindsey Strelecki, BSN, RN

Nursing first

I came to aesthetics from hospital nursing, which is a less glamorous route than it sounds and a more useful one than it looks. Most of those years were spent in the cardiovascular ICU at Hoag in Newport Beach, and at Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington. Hoag holds Magnet recognition, a designation the American Nurses Credentialing Center gives to a small minority of US hospitals for nursing standards specifically, and it is a meaningful thing to have trained inside.

A cardiovascular ICU is not a gentle place to learn. You are watching people through the first hours after heart surgery, where small changes matter early and nobody gets to be casual about anatomy.

Critical care teaches a particular set of habits: assess before you act, know the anatomy underneath what you are looking at, take complications seriously before they happen rather than after, and be able to explain to a frightened person exactly what is about to occur and why.

Those habits do not disappear when the setting becomes a treatment room with better lighting. They are most of what separates an injector who is technically capable from one you would send your sister to.

Why aesthetics

The honest answer starts with my own face. After my second pregnancy my skin changed in ways I was not expecting: uneven, dull, tired-looking. I was eating well, exercising, sleeping about as much as anyone does with two under three. I felt healthy. I did not think I looked it, and I started putting makeup on to run errands and go to the gym, which is not me at all.

So I researched it the way a nurse researches things. Some of the skincare helped. What actually changed it was giving up on chasing every trend and doing a few strategic medical-grade treatments along with upper-face Botox instead. The goal was never to look different. It was to look like how I already felt.

What struck me afterwards was how many people are walking around feeling exactly how I had felt, assuming they simply have to live with it, or that this whole field is overwhelming, unnatural, or not for them. It is none of those things. You do not need a dozen treatments or an overdone look. A thoughtful plan and a few targeted things usually does it. That is what took me out of hospital nursing. I still care for people every day. I just do it differently now.

The move was not away from medicine. It was toward a kind of care where the same person sees you repeatedly over years, where the plan can be gradual, and where you set the goal rather than a diagnosis setting it for you.

What holds my attention is the assessment. Faces are asymmetric, they change unevenly, and the thing a person points to in the mirror is frequently not the thing actually causing it. Working out what is really driving a change, and having the discipline to treat that rather than the symptom, is the interesting part of the job and the part most patients never see happening.

How I work

Conservatively, and out loud. I start below the maximum dose whenever there is doubt, because adding at a two-week review is straightforward and subtracting is not. I photograph in consistent lighting and angles, using Manor’s Visia imaging where it helps, so that change over a year is measurable rather than remembered. Visia is also the fastest way to end an argument with yourself about whether something is working, in either direction. I write plans down, sequence them across months, and build them to be paused.

I will tell you when the answer is nothing, or when your skin needs sorting out before I touch your structure, or when the thing you asked for is going to make your face look worse. It costs me the sale. That is the job.

The other half of it is less technical and matters just as much. I want you to understand why your face is doing what it is doing, because a plan you understand is a plan you can actually agree with. That is the whole reason I teach through a consultation instead of presenting a recommendation. Education is what turns my plan into our plan.

What I treat most

Neuromodulators, full facial balancing with filler, lip and perioral work, biostimulators including Sculptra, and Sciton light and laser treatments including BBL HERO, Halo and MOXI.

The wellness side is not a bolt-on. Sleep, recovery, metabolic health and sun exposure all show up in the mirror, and treating a face without acknowledging that is treating the symptom. I follow this area closely and take it seriously enough to have worked through a fair amount of it personally, peptides among other things, which means I can talk about what the evidence actually supports and where the marketing has gotten ahead of it. Where it is clinically appropriate, I bring Manor’s wellness clinicians into the conversation.

Credentials

• Registered Nurse (RN), licensed by the Texas Board of Nursing. Any Texas nurse’s license can be verified through the Board’s public lookup, and you are welcome to do that.
• Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN).
• More than twenty years of nursing experience, much of it in cardiovascular intensive care.
• Hospital experience at Hoag in Newport Beach, California, which holds Magnet recognition, and at Overlake Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington.
• Background in plastic surgery before moving into aesthetic medicine full time.
• Four-plus years practicing in aesthetic medicine.
• Practicing at Manor Aesthetics & Wellness, Fort Worth, under that practice’s medical direction.

Manufacturer training certifications and continuing education are listed on request; specific credentials are confirmed at consultation rather than claimed loosely here.