Women with breast cancer must undergo either partial or total surgical ablation. This is very often followed by radiotherapy and chemotherapy and the patients are treated by an oncologist. When the therapy is over, the oncologist may recommend breast reconstruction, carried out by a plastic surgeon. There are several ways of breast reconstruction.
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We can use a silicone implant, which is inserted under the skin in the place where the breast was removed. If there is not enough skin to use for the implant insertion, we must move the skin from the surroundings, mostly from the exterior part of the chest, and we insert the implant under the dermal fold created in this way. Using one’s own tissue from the abdomen presents another method of reconstruction, when we remove the skin and the subcutis from the area under the navel, and we transfer the entire tissue onto the chest. Using a microscope, the blood vessels of the transferred tissue are connected to the blood vessels in the area of the chest, and the tissue is modelled to get the shape of a breast. This microsurgical technology is much more demanding, technically, and takes more time in comparison to the silicone implant reconstruction; the advantage, however, is that one’s own tissue is used.
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The hospital stay with the implant breast reconstruction varies from between 3 to 7 days and office work is possible 2 weeks later. With microsurgical reconstruction, hospitalisation may last for 2 weeks, and full physical strain is possible no sooner than 6 weeks after the surgery.
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| pre-surgery | post-surgery | post-surgery |
