Reconstruction surgery – Laurie

 

A Goldilocks mastectomy was exactly what Laurie wanted.

Transcript

Actually I went back and I looked at my Facebook page. All the pictures I’d put up of me doing stuff and in no picture did my breasts figure as an important part of what I was doing. So I thought well, why not just remove the breasts because that seems like the safest thing to do. Then if there’s anything evil in the left breast it’s gone and there won’t be as much follow-up and worry about what happens in the future. But I knew the surgeon wasn’t going to be very keen about this idea. So then, I also thought, when they do a mastectomy, normally they make an incision just straight across, so you just have a straight line and a completely flat chest. And I’m thinking, why is that, isn’t there some better way of doing that? If this was for a guy and it was some important part of the guy’s anatomy, would they just do that, would they just make a straight line across or would they sort of try and figure out how to leave something that looks a little more natural than that.

And then I looked up some websites of transsexual people who are actually having… changing from female to male. They actually, they have thought very hard about what their, what they want their chest to look like after having the breast tissue removed. And I thought, so people have thought about this but not the cancer surgeons. And then I started looking on the Internet for information and I found some pictures of what the breast would look like after a mastectomy. I actually found one woman who had made her own blog, that actually showed her scars, because she said it was very hard to find information and she wanted to be able to show her husband and talk about what it would look like. And so since she couldn’t find it, she just made one herself and it wasn’t so bad. So then, I’m thinking well okay. I thought, there must be something better and I looked in the (name university) library online and found the most recent textbook on breast surgery and at the very end of the chapter on mastectomy there was a short section on this new thing called the Goldiloks mastectomy which was exactly what I was looking for.


More from:

More content