Mastectomy surgery is quite different, thank heavens, from the way it was 40 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. Wow, let me think again... how about 2 years ago!
Hard to believe? Well, let me tell you the history of this procedure so you can understand how vastly its techniques have improved. Then maybe, after you read this, you will begin to look at mastectomy surgery a bit differently.
The creator of the mastectomy was Dr. William Halsted, one of the gifted and incredibly forward-thinking doctors at Johns Hopkins a century ago. He developed the (Halsted) total radical mastectomy procedure, with the goal of saving more women's lives. And he did, and those who learned this technique from him did as well.
The majority of breast cancers diagnosed back in Halsted's day were huge because they were usually detected at a very late stage. Ironically though, while reading one of his patient's medical records (Hopkins hospital has never discarded a single medical record since it opened its doors nearly 125 years ago), Halsted noted that the woman had a "relatively small tumor only measuring 8 cm in size." That's of course big by today's standards, nearly the size of my fist.
His procedure was indeed radical: He removed the breast, both chest muscles, all the lymph nodes in the armpit area, and some from the chest area. (In some cases, he would even take out a rib or two.) All the breast skin was removed, usually resulting in the need for a skin graft from the woman's back to close up the chest wound. A very horrific operation to be sure, but it did save lives.
And, believe it or not (I keep finding it necessary to use that expression!), surgeons continued to carry out this procedure, in exactly this way, well into the early 1970s. No wonder breast cancer has been womankind's most dreaded disease.
Today, however, 80 percent of the women who would have been candidates for Halsted's radical mastectomy back then can now have lumpectomy surgery accompanied by sentinel node biopsy. And... if the sentinel node is free of cancer, no axillary node dissection need be done. And... even the 20 percent of women today who still must have a full mastectomy can, with few exceptions, come out of the procedure with breasts that look very similar to how they looked before their cancers were discovered.
Don't believe it? Well, please do—I see it every day.
And that's not nearly all. We are now able to do what's called a skin-sparing mastectomy, saving virtually all of the skin of the breast by hollowing out the breast and then filling the space with something else—such as body fat from her tummy or buttocks—or with implants.
Even this self-esteem-saving procedure has now been taken a step further in those women who meet certain criteria (for example, the distance the tumor is from the nipple and areola complex). Such women can have both skin-sparing and nipple-sparing mastectomy surgery.
To spare the nipple, the incision is made along an edge of the areola, and the contents of the breast are then removed through this half-circle opening. The breast is then filled with something healthier than was there before, like tummy fat, and the half-moon incision is sutured closed. You'd need to get up real close and personal to see that she's had surgery at all and it would be even harder to believe that she's had a mastectomy.
I'd love to see Playboy Magazine do a feature story on this. I think it could be a way to promote discussions between men and their significant sweeties, very possibly reducing the fears of both partners about this disease and what a mastectomy means in this day and age. What do you think?
