Robert Whitfield MD presents a 2016 case where a breast cancer patient with reconstructive implants had an undetected E. coli infection causing fatigue. The video examines how hidden bacterial infections can contribute to breast implant illness and why thorough medical evaluation matters.
So I became problem aware of this in its current iteration. And the term breast implant illness is, is used on social media a lot now in 2016. And I had a breast cancer patient come to me and desired to have their implant based reconstruction removed. They wanted to go flat. And so that's perfectly acceptable. You go through everything with the patient. And I had done this for cancer patients over my career, so I did that for them. And ultimately, when we take all the scar tissue out, we do a couple things when we're doing this, especially in the cancer environment, is we look for bacteria in the pocket where the implant sat. So we would use a culture technique, it looks like a Q tip swab, and you would send that to the lab. And then when you remove the scar tissue and or any scarring from the incision, replacement of the device, you would send all that to pathologist to make sure there's no recurrent or residual cancer. And so we would do this in every single case. And I did that for this patient. And she had no evidence of recurrent cancer, which is first and foremost. But she had an E. Coli infection. And so I. First of all, that's very shocking to me that someone can walk around with an E. Coli infection here, here in the chest. So how did they get that? How did I miss that? There's all these questions at this point. And you know, my sister recently passed away from breast cancer. So if someone had missed that in my sister, I'd be furious, bothersome, you know, to. To put it mildly. So I went back through all the notes and everything and we didn't have any clues in the examination, the history. The only clue in the history was she was tired, she had fatigue, which happens from patients who get chemotherapy, they get a lot of bone marrow suppression. So fatigue is a relatively common thing. But that was the only thing in this patient. And so we treated her appropriately with an antibiotic for that specific bacteria, E. Coli, and all of her fatigue went away. So she had been carrying this around for an undetermined amount of time.
