A breast cancer survivor who had reconstruction 20 years earlier asked Dr. Robert Whitfield to remove her implants. She wanted to be flat and felt fatigued, with no specific medical problem. Whitfield describes the en bloc removal technique, where the implant and surrounding capsule come out together in one undisturbed piece.
Moving forward, in 2016 I had a breast cancer patient who relocated from Georgia to retire here in Austin on the lake, and she came to me and said, I want my reconstruction taken down, Dr. Whitfield MD. And I said, okay. Um, there was no specific reason, she just wanted to be flat. She was tired of having a reconstruction. She had had one forever, 20-some years. Um, she had no real physical findings on examination. Her history was otherwise consistent with a breast cancer survivor. Okay, so she Healthy. Oh, okay, so she wasn't healthy. But the predominant thinking, Dave, is if you had cancer and you were treated with poison to cure your cancer and you had bone marrow suppression, that explains your fatigue. And I was in that lane. That's what I saw. That's what you believed. So I took her to the operating room. She said, can you take out my implants on block? And so for the audience, en bloc is a term used in pathology. It's tumor extirpation, uh, extirpation or removal is done en bloc. Say for a sarcoma or any cancer, you want to be around it, not in it. The scar capsule and the implant together. So when I talk about it, I say it's like taking things out in an undisturbed manner, like not breaking the Easter egg. Okay.
