If you’re faced with the choice of whether to reconstruct your breast after cancer, figuring out how to preserve your natural appearance is a huge issue.
In a procedure called “nipple-sparing mastectomy,” doctors use special techniques to shell out a woman’s breast, leaving the skin, and the nipple intact. The idea is to maintain, as close as possible anyway, the natural look of the breast. After mastectomy, a plastic surgeon will use either an implant or the woman’s own tissue to recreate the breast. When a woman’s own tissue is used, doctors typically take it from fat in the patient’s lower abdomen.
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“It is certainly the ideal procedure for those woman who chose to have prophylactic mastectomy who don’t yet have breast cancer,” says Dr. Irene Wapnir, a breast surgeon at Stanford Medicine. The downside to this type of procedure, says Dr. Wapnir, is a loss of sensation in the nipple area.
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