Breast Cancer – Autologous Reconstruction – Mastectomy

Transcript

So, if you do fall into the category of mastectomy or removal of the entire breast, there’s two major avenues of reconstruction with this. There’s implant-based reconstruction and there’s autologous reconstruction. That’s just a fancy word for where we use your tissue, skin and adipose tissue, to reconstruct the breast. Typically with implant-based reconstruction, we place a tissue expander at the time of your mastectomy. This allows us to stretch the tissue slowly over time to allow us to form a pocket or home for the gel implant that will be placed at a later date. A tissue expander is nothing more than a deflated implant with a special valve on it that allows us to access that in the clinic and to fill the implant slowly over time.