Dr. Robert Whitfield describes a 2016 case where a breast cancer patient declined reconstruction. Surgery revealed no recurrence, but tissue cultures grew E. coli, highlighting how bacterial infections around implants can hide until the operating room.
Robert Whitfield MD
2016
E. coli
May 20, 2025
Cancer patient I took care of in 2016. The patient came to me and said, you know, I don't want to have a breast reconstruction anymore. I'm just. I'm retired now. I don't want it. And that's totally fine. I did her diagnostic workup, reviewed all of her records. Her examination was totally normal. I believe she had to be monitored overnight in the hospital for a preexisting condition based on her primary care doctor's recommendation. So I did her case in hospital. And so everybody listening when I would take you down a breast reconstruction, you got to think of it like the Easter egg. You don't want to, you know, find the candy inside. You want to do that after the fact. So you want to send everything out. And if it's infected, you want to keep that inside the scar tissue around the implant itself. If it's got recurrent cancer, you got to send all these things off to make sure that's not the case for the patients. Of course. And at a week, she didn't have any recurrent cancer on her screening for that, which is the pathology report, but on the report to look for an infection, she did. She had an E. Coli infection. Oh. And so my sister, who recently passed away after a long bout with breast cancer and recurrences and things, I would have been supremely pissed off if someone had missed that on my sister. So I went back through all of my records and notes, and no indication of this. And this kind of goes to the limitation of this. So if someone has an implant that actually has bacteria around it, we have no way of knowing that.
