Breast Reconstruction

After breast cancer surgery( mastectomy ), women are faced with so many options on breast reconstruction it can be very overwhelming. So honored to have Ron Israeli, a plastic surgeons be one of our medical advisors to help people understand more about this very important decision.

“Hi, it’s Doctor Israeli. Today, we’re going to discuss the differences and considerations associated with direct-to-implant breast reconstruction and tissue-expander breast reconstruction. How do we decide?

If the breast skin is of sufficient quality following mastectomy—especially with nipple-sparing approaches—we can go directly to an implant, avoiding a tissue expander. But there’s another factor that we take into consideration, and that is the patient-desired volume following her reconstruction. If a patient wants to be bigger than she was prior to surgery, then a tissue expander may be the right way to go.

We place a tissue expander at the time of mastectomy. This allows us to expand the breast volume during the recovery phase, and we come back for a secondary, easier procedure to take out the expander, put in a final implant, and create a fuller-volume breast reconstruction.