Episode 128: The Breast Explant Story Every Woman Needs to Hear, with Kathy Dixon

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Dr. Rob Whitfield, the board certified plastic surgeon specializing in explant surgery Breast implant illness is a topic that is not often talked enough about, especially in medical community, but is something that affects many women. In this podcast I'll be discussing the latest research, treatment options and personal stories of women who have undergone explant surgery in an effort to heal breast implant illness. In this podcast, we'll explore the symptoms.

Of breast implant illness and delve into.

The latest surgical techniques for explantation and the recovery process. Whether you are currently experiencing breast implant illness or are considering explant surgery, this podcast is a valuable resource for anyone looking to take control of their health and wellness. So let's dive in.

Welcome to the show. Today we have a special guest, Kathy Dixon. Kathy is a mom of four, a wife to an Air Force veteran, and fierce believer in the power of clarity in life, business and everything in between. A Maryland native, she thrives where life is full of and purpose driven. Since founding oh Yes Communications 2013, she has helped businesses better communicate, reignite their marketing, and reconnect with the people they serve inside and out of the business. Their messaging visual strategy Kathy and her team bring clarity to the forefront of every brand story, whether guiding a team through a rebrand or refining their message. She leads with Clarity first because when the words match the mission, everything else flows. In 2023, Kathy began navigating several physical symptoms that seemed unrelated until she learned about breast implant illness. In March 2025, she underwent an explant, but not without intentional preparation, but physical mental to be ready for any body image challenges along the way. Please welcome to the show, Kathy Dixon. Well, I have a very special guest today. Kathy Dixon. One of my patients has been gracious enough at her four to five week mark after surgery to come on and share how she's doing and to let the audience know. One of the reasons I wanted Kathy on was she had made really quite a few positive remarks about the work she had done in preparation for surgery just from a like a mental standpoint. And I want everybody to listen and carefully to what she says in this episode because I think it's critical to work on yourself before you ever show up to see me. So thank you so much for coming on Kathy.

I'm honored to be here. It feels like a full circle moment from learning about you a few years ago and now having gone through the process and getting to have a conversation with you today.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and we had a little bit of discussion beforehand, but I've had patients come on and really give me quite the list of things that I never would have concluded were reasons potentially for getting augmentation. And then the discussions around augmentation, then of course, what, what led them to explant. So I kind of will ask what led you to entertain a change like augmentation and then like what were your options that were given to you seven years ago when you were looking for that?

Yeah. So it's funny, I've done so much reflective work leading up to the surgery and for me it was never a matter of if I would get plastic surgery, specifically breast augmentation. It was when I think a lot of it actually had to do with my cultural influence. I'm 100% Colombian, first generation here. And in our culture it's very normal. It's almost like a rite of passage. Right. So I used to joke with my husband when we had kids, like, listen, you found, you found the toys in one condition. I would like them restored back to that condition once we're done having kids. And it was this joke and it was very lighthearted started and then we, we always knew we wanted a large family. So we have four kids now. I was after, after my second son that I was just completely taken aback at how much volume I had lost. So for me it went from maybe a full C cup, which broader shoulder and I'm a bit taller. It was normal for my frame to really a B cup after doing the macros and losing the weight. And I couldn't get things that I used to be able to, to fit right. And it was really after a teary eyed shopping situation in preparation for a party that we were invited to that I came home and I just told my husband I'm not happy with the way I look and I think I want to do this sooner than later. And he was very supportive and my husband's always been supportive in all my many ideas that I bring to the table. But when we went to the surgeon's office, I mean, I wish I knew back then what I know now as far as fat transfers and being able to do a lift and a fat transfer and maybe that having been enough that never even a discussion. And I think my experience is probably not unique in that I was encouraged to go larger. Right. So I was kind of sizing, trying different sizes out and the feedback was everybody comes back and wants to go larger.

So pause there because I'm going to do a top 10 list of things I hear and that is the number one.

Yeah.

So number One folks are told, this is a hedge that really bothers me because you can decide as a surgeon to help give people enough information to make the best decision, but then you have to do on your end as a surgeon, something a step further in my head, which is if, in fact the. The one you. You should be able to help them decide, hey, this fits your frame. These are your measurements. And for everybody listening, it's like, for lack of a better word, you would say a shoe size, right? You have a shoe size. So similarly, you have a footprint for a breast. And exceeding it widely does not help the patient from a functional standpoint, we'll say. So they'll have more postural problems, cervical or neck and back pain if it's too heavy, so, meaning too big. Or you'll have obstruction of movement of your arm when you exercise, or when you just hold it at your side if it's too wide. I think these are just like, simple, fundamental things that from my perspective, I always would have to explain and make sure that everybody understood. And then if you said to me, oh, but, Dr. Witchfall, I want to be bigger, I had this great thing in my vocabulary. I just would say no.

Imagine that.

I didn't care. Like, if it didn't make sense to me, you couldn't make me do it. So it was always something to me that I had, for instance, a patient come to me and say they wanted to look like a ballerina. And I was like, there are no ballerinas with fake boobs. Just so you know, that's not a thing. And she just looked at me like I was high, and I was just like, well, I'm not your person. Right. That makes no sense.

Yeah, I think that's part of what attracted me to you as far as seeking out a relationship for this journey for myself, was that you did have strong opinions and they were maybe a bit controversial to what you hear in mainstream experiences. And I'm that way in a lot of ways as well. So it made me lean in and listen and want to learn more. And I mean, really, you cultivated a relationship with me without realizing it, through podcasts, through post, over the course of 18 months before I actually reached out.

Yeah. The only other comment I would say is it was. It was concerning to me. What you've said and what I've heard is nobody heard other alternatives. All they heard was, a device is your only alternative, which, of course, is not the case. You can absolutely do nothing. If you have enough breast tissue, you can always reshape and lift it, you don't need to add volume to it. That's another misconception. Like somebody has kids, they become a little deflated even though they have already got a lot of breast tissue and maybe they would have been fine with a lift.

I was told I didn't need a lift and I had breastfed two kids at that point for a total of 14 months between the two. And it's, it's funny, I look back now. I remember when your team asked for my before photos, before I had the augmentation. I didn't like how I looked even when I saw the photos leading up to the surgery where I am now understanding that I'm still in the very beginning stages of healing and it's going to be a 6 to 12 month process to really see like where I'm going to land. I'm much happier now with the way I look than I am with the implants or before the implant. So it's just been this whole process of just observing and noting and reflecting and it's just, it's interesting those twists and turns we take to get to where we are.

And that's with more life experience and everything that I. That's not an uncommon thing I hear now culturally. I just want to point out that she is from heritage, is from Colombia. So in South America, and traditionally in South America, it's more of a larger butt, smaller breast. Now I think, unfortunately my country's influenced much of the world into having bigger breasts and not concerning themselves about the buttocks. But after the big revolution about 20 years ago in South America of doing Brazilian butt lifts. So fat transfers to buttocks that kind of filtered in first and we'll say the markets of Miami and, and la, of course. And unfortunately there were deaths associated with those because people were doing them without proper technique, I would say. So I wrote a safety paper about that. Oh gosh, 2000, you'd have to look back 18, 19, something like that. And it's a very straightforward operation. So I bring it up because fat transfers somehow become bastardized in relationship as a breast augmentation, which is like to me it just like nonsensical, right? Like nobody would have a fat transfer of their butt if it didn't work the right thing. Everybody listening. Like, your butt is way bigger than your boob and the space, the, the fatty layer beneath the skin on the chest is a smaller compartment than the fatty layer of your butt. Think of the pocket on your butt and the pocket on the front of his shirt. They're not the same size. So just use that as an analogy. Right. Dr. Whitfield can put a lot more fat on top of the butt muscle but beneath the skin than he could beneath the skin and above the breast tissue. So like, conceptually I'm always kind of baffled why this is so hard or a bridge too far to cross. Like if I put fat in someone's face, all of it heals. Basically all of it will heal, which is also another weird thing because the face has the best blood supply, the best lymphatic drainage, everything you put there, heels. So you better be damn sure you don't put too much and in the wrong place. So little bits go a long way and deep, not superficial.

It's interesting how controversial it still is, the fat grafting to the, to the breast. And leading up to the surgery, I was kind of on the fence. Do I do the fat transfer right away or do I wait? And I ultimately decided I wanted to wait and just see how things settled before making that decision. But the research leading up to that, other than you and maybe one other doctor in the Florida region, every other doctor that I was watching their content, it was basically discouraging that decision at all.

Yeah, it's such a weird thing to me. Like, so for everybody listening, this thing like fat transfers have been around over 100 years. Like they're not new. And there was tons of work done. We'll say in the late 90s to the early 2000s, we'll say from I don't know, we'll go 96 to 2010. Lots, lots of work, tons. And how much fat, what technique of processing, how much volume transfer. And everybody can draw their conclusions. But once again, I'll go back to the same things, like in faces and butts, it works just fine. So help me understand why it doesn't work in a breast. Well, it's a different space and you have to put it in the correct layer and the volume amount you get is different in each person obviously. Now I will say this. When you use a use case, is 18 to 25 year old tight skin never going to be able to put a lot in? Let's just think logically here. That's why people opt to go to implants. They're low bmi, so there's not a lot of fat. It's cost effective to do a simple one step operation, device placement in that patient population. So you'll get shifted into that. And depending on who you speak to, you know, I had done thousands fat transfers for cancer patients and cosmetic Patients. So it's not really one hard for me to talk about with anybody. It's still not when. When I. The Internet's undefeated. Undefeated, of course. But I'm older than the Internet, which is nice. So all this stuff, it's. There's so much confusion about and noise and people posting things. Like if you don't know how to do something and you're. How would you say it? 1. Fat transfers. Like if you have never done one as a plastic surgeon, don't talk about them. If you haven't done several thousand, you probably should just keep it under wraps because you're not experienced enough to really talk about it. It's not something that a patient who's coming to seek consultation wants to hear about that somebody's done once or ten times or a hundred times. Like that's a very small sample size. Like my career is almost 30 years and I've done thousands of them. I speak from a lot of experience and a lot of venues for cosmetic cancer, people taking hormone blockers, all sorts of things that make it more complicated to do. So it's not. The thing that keeps changing in my practice is the patient. We know technically what to do. We have the best equipment and the process down. That's not the situation. But we want to put the patients like Kathy or anybody coming to me, and I'm very discriminatory about who I'll offer what. Like I don't offer everybody a fat transfer and I'll still do simultaneous fat transfers, given some specific criteria that we have through our program. Sharp. But it works. It's not that complicated. Like if you gave me a 25 year old who was a little heavy and said, oh, I want to do a breast augmentation or buttock augmentation, of course that should work. Their hormones are great, even if they don't eat great, which typically young people don't. Even if they don't sleep great. Like their metabolism, everything else is like totally in their favor. And then as we age, obviously things fall out of our favor. And then as you have more kids are very stressful. I'm a parent. I get it. You have four, I have two. It seems like I have four, but I only have two.

I have 12. From what it feels like some days.

Three of them.

Three of them are boys. So it's MMA fight here most days.

Well, you're only gonna have one girl prom. I just had that with my daughter. And that was a lot.

The dress shopping. That's a lot of things going to being ready for prom. For a girl, yeah.

That's way different than my son was. So love her to death. But that's a whole. That was a new experience for me.

You got through it. Congratulations so far.

Well, in terms of, so we know culturally was okay, obviously like you said, surgery, Columbia is a very pro plastic surgery environment. I have great in Colombia, in Cali, in Bogota. Who operate then timing wise, obviously like you said, you have four kids. Are you guys going to have more kiddos?

We're done. The factory is closed.

Got it. So Kathy had made a decision to, to get that taken care of and, and then now she had them and kind of carry us through the process. You had that surgery done and then what, what sequence did, you know, kind of fall into? I mean I've had so many different types of things ascribed to this. Let' your perspective tell us how things evolved.

Yeah. So initially, ironically, I had a capsular contracture right away on the left, left side breast. And that had to get fixed within two months basically. And it was very painful, very tight. That should have been a sign that my body was not happy with this. But I didn't know what I didn't know had that fixed, it seemed to be healing much better. In our consultation you actually pointed out the same side. You're like, that still has a contraction right there. And I said I would have never noticed, but once you pointed it out, I couldn't unsee it. And things were, were fine for about two years, two to three years, things felt fine. I wouldn't say that I was having any symptoms. And then around 2022, 2023, I started having like a bunch of symptoms that felt unrelated and I felt like my body was sort of falling apart on me. The first thing was that I had a tremendous spike in anxiety. It felt like it was almost over the matter of a few weeks where I was having heart palpitations all day long in my sleep while I was working. And when things were seemingly fine and calm and everybody's at school or work and I'm here working from home by myself and it kind of worried me. I'm like, am I having heart issues? I wasn't able to regulate my emotions around normal, everyday disturbances in a family life. And it got to a place where my husband, who at that point he was still in the military, so we were used to this high paced, high stress lifestyle and I knew how to cope with a lot coming at me at once by myself. We went on a walk around the neighborhood and he actually pointed it out. He's like, hey, what's, what's going on with you? Like, you're. You're so upset all the time and you're on edge. It's not like you. And I remember turning to him and saying, I can't even stand myself right now. I have no idea what's going on. I own a marketing agency. I'm in year 12 now, and I was having the hardest time just getting myself to sit down in front of the computer and, like, focus. And my gifting is hyperfocus, right? And the things that I like, I can spend six hours doing something that I love. And then all of a sudden, the day's over. And it almost felt like this physical resistance of, like, being able to focus. So I went down the rep pathway of psychiatry and heart doctors, and then I started getting sharp pain on that one side. And it was pretty much on and off all the time. It was between dull, constant dull pain to if I move my arm a certain way, almost like I pull the muscle, right? And so went back to the plastic surgeon that did. Did the surgery and everything to him looked fine. He sent me to a mammogram and sonogram and completely clean, right? It might just be scar tissue. There's nothing, nothing here. Everything looks fine. That didn't resolve my problem. About a year later, sex drive completely went away. And that was a tough one to navigate. I wasn't sleeping. Chunks of hair were falling out in the shower. I mean, thank God. Like, so I went to a hormone specialist, right? So I actually started at my ob gyn. They wrote it off as, like, well, you're getting older. This happens. And I was just not satisfied with that answer. I refused to live that way for 10 years. And so I went to doctors that specialize in this. Come to find out, my testosterone was almost non existent. My progesterone, very, very low, vitamin D, very, very low. So it was just all these things at once that left me feeling very defeated. Like, man, I was an athlete all my life. I still take care of myself very well, work out several times a week, eat clean, like, do all the things, and my body's just. It's falling apart on me. And then I came across a podcast that you were on, and I listened to it and it was like all the lights went off and I was like, oh, my God. It had never even crossed my mind that maybe my implants were causing me to have all the issues that I had. And then obviously, you have a very extensive process of testing and then come to find out my mold count is through the roof. I mean, you said to me the highest you'd seen other than one other person in the last six, eight months. Yeah, it was just, it was a lot at once that had I not been. Have I. Had I not been proactive? And also just like a person who refuses to hear that suffering is the status quo for a decade. I mean, I imagine there are women that would just accept that and be like, well, this is just my new normal. And I'm so grateful that I kept pressing on to try and figure out what was going on with my body.

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And I don't want to throw any particular specialty under the bus because I could throw the entire conventional community under the bus if I chose to based on the things that my patients just have told me that they've gotten in feedback from other specialists. And let's preface it this way, first of all, this is not easy problem to. To hear as a provider and then understand what is going on. I think for everybody listening, Kathy did not show up to my office with a red swollen breast and she did not ever show up to anybody's office with a red swollen breast. Had she? Everybody would ding Ding, ding, know what's going on. Now, she did say she had a capture contracture. Now I'll give a little history. Like all the studies done about capture contracture early on were done with culture swabs, was like a Q tip and then grown on an agriplate in an incubator, which is as old as I am. That process is just standard of care still basically around the world now everybody knows who listens to my show and understands what I did and what I published last year. I use PCR testing for everything. So when I did Kathy's explant, her PCR testing was negative. That doesn't mean initially when she had her problem, that she didn't have a bacterial contaminant. But it wasn't found at that time. And the most sensitive and specific technique to use to find that is a PCR test. Now, when they did her exchange, you still have scarring and all the things. And at this last surgery that we did for you, I try to close the loop on all that. So I, I send everything off as I test, I test all the stuff and everybody listening, like if you go to a provider and they don't test anything, that should give you some pause. There's things that will in and in. In the paper that we published last year in September of 24 showed that 29% had bacterial contamination found on PCR testing. So you would miss all 29% of those in your patient population. And in other studies it's up to 48%, which I find terrible. But so I think the real rate that I published out of 700 samples is 29%. So I believe in that. Now I have not published our pathology results. I send every single sample off to the pathologist so they can look at it, because I'm not looking for anaplastic large cell lymphoma in every case because that's not going to be. That's a very small percentage, predominantly obviously in text, extra devices. But what you will find is breast cancer because that's the most prevalent cancer to find. And I've found unfortunately a handful of those. And we found many of them early enough to where they did not require mastectomy or other interventions because we found them very early. So my sister passed away from breast cancer this past January. And so there's no chance in hell I don't ever not send a specimen. It's never going to happen in my practice as long as I still draw breath and operate. Because you don't. If that was you or my wife or my sister. That's one person too many to have missed something. So I don't find it acceptable that people don't send things because that's just a crock. Because somebody will. Like I've already said, I don't care how many thousands. I do. If there's a handful of them, that's, that's more than enough. That's way too many, basically. And every time I have somebody with a abnormality, of course, who are they going to reach out to? They're going to reach out to me afterwards, even though I didn't operate on the breast. Everybody understands I don't go wandering through the breast. I don't go taking things out that aren't related to the device unless it's an obvious thing on the capsule. So there are a lot of reasons to have concern regarding the device, but to wrap it all up is still hard for providers. And there's no reason to put your head in the sand and ignore it as a problem. Like if you had a. If your husband had a knee or a hip implant and he had pain in it, the orthopedic surgeon would go to great length to figure out whether that thing was infected or not because it has really some significant ramifications. But it seems like in breast implants, for whatever reason, the same vigor is not used to figure out whether or not there's a specific problem. Because you have a device, you can stick a needle into the device because the device has a shell that's penetrated by a needle very easily, unlike you bang into a hip implant or knee implant, nobody cares because you're not going to hurt that. So I feel that's part of it, obviously. And everything I'm telling you I learned forensically. So after the fact, we don't know that up front. Now, there were papers published in 1Q24 about Oxylipin 10 homes. So if you had a contaminant from Staph Epi in particular that causes a interaction between the breast tissues fatty acids causes this oxylipin tinhole production as well as there can be other oxylipins. The fancy thing is that's a biomarker that elevates those patients who are symptomatic. And it's responsible possibly for a lot of the things you're describing and other patients describe. We don't know what we don't know. So I don't sit there and claim like I know everything, but I can tell you I have a lot more information than most people because we've been diligent about looking at genetics, we've been diligent about looking at toxicity. And I'm glad you brought up mycotoxins. I swear when I was in med school we talked about endotoxins from bacteria, but I don't know if I was ever given much information about mycotoxins. I hope I was there that day, but I don't remember that being a big part of my training. And it seems like the toxicity associated with mold is really underappreciated as a driver of just health issues in general.

I look forward to a day when more providers are equipped with the knowledge and training to support women through all phases of their life. Because I think I learned how underserved the female population is through having children. The type of care that I received while pregnant versus the see in six weeks and hope you're doing well after having the babies was really jarring when I was 27 and had my first child. And then now as I'm in the perimenopause phase, I mean, going to the ob GYN and sharing these issues and symptoms and it was just chalked up to age. And then with pushing back a bit more, she was like, well, I could give you the number to my pharmacist that does stuff for me. She was ready to put me on birth control. And then I ended up seeing her right before the surgery happened and she couldn't understand. And I said, I'm actually having an explant in two weeks to get these things out. They're causing a lot of issues in my body. And her very first comment back, it was almost like deer in the headlights. Not like, good for you, not tell me more. Her very first question was, so are you swapping them out for saline ones? And then instead. And I said, no, why on earth would I put something back in my body? It's just, it's a mess. It's a mess. And so yeah, it was a very eye opening process.

And I'm glad you brought that up because the birth control thing, oh gosh, it's awful wacky. Like if someone's having a hormone problem, the first inclination is to put them on something that affects their hormones, which seems like so counterintuitive to me. And I hear so many people who get that explanation and then all you do is add Accutane as a teenager for acne and or breast implants. You're talking about a pretty bad combo of, of exposures to someone that affects their gut brain axis and I, I find that supremely difficult to navigate in the, like, I've had people on birth control their entire lives, basically.

I mean, I feel like I'm the, I'm 37, almost 38 and I feel like I am the birth control generation. That that was the thing that was given right away. If cramps are too bad or birth control, obviously. And I don't know what the correlation is between that and being able to get pregnant, but I know that many women that surround me, this is an issue and it just, it makes you wonder, it makes you wonder what, what's behind that?

Yeah, estrogen toxicity plays a role. I don't want to say it's the only contributor. I just had a discussion with a very famous fertility doctor, not going to say who, and they were seemingly skeptical about what I was giving them is terms of my experience with this particular problem and fertility. And I was like, okay, I mean I get it. It's conceptually new to them. And we're not very good about being early adopters because if you put self, if you put yourself out there like I have, you're a target. It's fine. I'm totally fine with it. I'm, I get up every day, I sleep very well, totally fine. I'm doing and very methodical about, you know, what I do. Am I going to make mistakes? Oh yeah, of course it's going to happen. I'm not afraid to make a mistake. Totally fine with it. Super accountable. If I up, I'm happy to say I did it and move on from it. In this arena, I try to be pretty measured with most everything I say so that I'm not getting too askew. But eventually folks are going to find themselves on really the wrong side of this for a number of reasons. As history repeats itself over and over again about the stupid things we've done in terms of women's health. Like they're far too numerous to recount on this show. But in, in general, like, I just go back to like the hormone, the birth control thing is nonsensical for bad periods and then Accutane for acne. You would not believe the number of people who put their kids on that at the kids request without any kind of long term understanding of what that's going to do to their gut health because that is going to get destroyed basically and you're going to end up with potentially leaky gut. All these things that it's terrible to have acne and that perception as a young person to have a ruined gut at 20 and live the rest of your life like that and pass it on to your children and them. Face that in this day and age, with all the nice things that we have going on in the world, it's pretty challenging. I don't wish that on anybody. So I'm like, no. Super cautious about any of those things. Now, we didn't talk about some of your detox issues, but obviously mold is paramount in your case and maybe kind of backtracking, looking at things that happen and your timing of it maybe give a little context about the mold and how concerning it's become and how we should be paying attention to. Like, I'm in Austin. Like, we have a high mold count. I didn't even know that when I moved here. People talking about allergies and cedar, and I'm like, I'm uniquely sensitive to mold. So Kathy knows my office has got all these air filters going all the time in it. And it's just. You have to take that into consideration.

Yeah. I would say that the education I received in starting to work with you and the. And the nurse that was assigned to me to have these sort of conversations prepping me towards surgery, my eyes were open to just how many things I didn't realize was affecting my health. So in my case, the mold that showed up in my testing, part of it is definitely environmental. And we're going through the process of sort of testing the rooms, and we've added the air filters and things, but also just the foods. Right. You hear about, buy your berries organic, buy your milk and eggs organic, grass fed. But I wasn't thinking about. I mean, I ate rice pretty much every other day of my life. Growing up, as in Hispanic culture. Right. Just how much potential mold is in that. I'm Colombian. I love coffee. We drink coffee every single day. Didn't realize I'm potentially dosing myself with mold every single day. And so just the cleanup process, it was. It's overwhelming to just see how much really has to be fixed. The quality of my water. Right. That might not be mold, but just. And it's all playing into this, like, burden level in my body that was spilling over. And in my testing, actually, we were seeing also that I was not detoxing. So my body was in this perpetual cycle of reabsorbing and not detoxing. And so in my case, my body was fighting for me, which probably led to a lot of the anxiety you mentioned during our pre op when I was in Austin that just this level of mold in my body can also affect just My brain and my ability to focus. And you asked my husband, does she have a hard time remembering things? And he, right off that we, we had just talked about that days before where he's like, I feel like I tell you things that are important to me and it's just like, like not in your brain. And it, and it had gotten to a point where I had asked him to like, make sure that I'm making eye contact with you and make sure that you know that I'm fully listening to you. And that was my attempt at trying to hopefully remember the things that he was telling me. And so it's just been this uncovering process of like cleaning up my food, cleaning up my environment. And I know it's going to be a process we're going to test at the end of the six month detox program and see where the, those things are at. But you were pretty upfront in saying this level of mold might require a different level of intervention. You know that to be able to clear it out.

Yeah, probably listening like, I have a problem with detoxification of mold. So I'm not unaware of how difficult it is to do the holistic approach because I tried to do all those things and advanced, advanced, advanced, advanced, advanced. And I don't, I'm not going to disclose or put anybody through the process I had to follow to solve mine because that's not the way we try to begin anything. We try to do everything in a, a productive but gentle manner so that we're not creating more and more stress on somebody that's first and foremost and doing all the things that Kathy is mentioning, controlling the air quality, the fluid quality, the food quality, the coffee quality. Think you know, and I'm glad you mentioned you're a Colombian and you, you love to drink coffee. It's very common. Coffee is a very big source in general of mold because of the way it's processed. It's not because anybody's intentionally making coffee full of mold. It's kind of in this country. And I'm sure you can appreciate this when you go home. Well, maybe you'd have to tell me. So I was just in Spain visiting my son and the table wine, the Catalunian table wine is phenomenal. And of course you don't have a headache and of course it doesn't bother you. You don't wake up with a hangover wine because it's illegal to put ochratoxin, which is a mycotoxin, above a certain level in wine, in, in the eu. But in this country, flip a label around on a wine bottle and see what it tells you. Absolutely nothing if it's from this country. So uniformly, like, I don't drink that much anymore. But every when we get something, we'll get cava, which is Spanish, and I'll flip the label. And I mean, my wife and I both kind of acquiesce that this is just something we have to do. And you have to make sure it's from Spain. And cava is typically from Spain. Kind of a pro tip here is cava is always going to be less expensive than champagne, but it's basically Spanish champagne. And it's very good. It doesn't have as high sugar content, which is something I look for all the time anyway. But it's got a label on it, it tells you what's in it. And it's from the eu, so you can't do things to it. It's just not acceptable. They don't allow it. But in our country it's allowed. So that's part. It's kind of like the coffee thing. I tell people, like, you gotta look for something that's mold free, whether it's life or key on or danger, or just type in mold free coffee. And if it doesn't say it on the bag, don't buy it. That's the easiest thing I can tell you.

And a swapping process for sure. And just noticing, even with our kids, the way they're eating, I appreciated even how you walked this out post operative. I woke up from the surgery and the first thing I was given was coconut water and almond crackers. My husband just went through a rotator cuff surgery yesterday and the first thing given to him was gingeritos.

Oh, ginger ale. Okay. Of course.

It's one of those things that I didn't think to bring him, you know, but here at home, we're controlling what's coming in and out. And it's. Yeah, I think it just gives you confidence as a client, as a patient, and just the integrity of how you walk out the process from beginning to end and knowing that it's not just like for social or for the marketing hits.

It was cute. Yesterday I was operating. Or is it Thursday? So I operated Tuesday. Thursday. Like it wasn't yesterday, so it was in the last Thursday. I was sitting there, just finishing up some paperwork, and the patient we had operated on previously was awake and she was just like Kathy said, my patients are offered coconut water. Patients are like, I don't want coconut water. I just want you know, regular water. And so everybody listening in and tuning in. Like, we don't give anybody regular water because the tap water is gross. So you either get hydrogen water from the echo water maker I had installed at the surgery center, where we're using. Using and doing a crisis now, or we, we give you still. That's actually not in plastic because I don't give patients anything in plastic, as you know, because we don't want to give you phthalates and we don't want to give you microplastics from that. So it was just cute to hear her say, oh, I don't want coconut water. I just want some regular water. And so we have that. Of course, it was just funny. And we'd like you said we have almond crackers. It's just. And then I go out in the lobby and there's like Doritos and Sprite and garbage. And I was like, man, wow, this is gonna, this is gonna be a tough nut to crack over time. But in a future situation, that stuff is gonna be barred from places that I do business with or at because that's just. It makes no sense to offer that to somebody having surgery or in general just doesn't make sense. So. And Kathy, I'm sure, got to eat at the well in Austin, which is great.

I grieve the fact we don't have it here in the D.C. area. That guacamole is next level, which is.

Shocking because I always equate. Well, you have so many cultures there. Like anything you want to go eat, you can go eat. So what's the dis. Is it Adams Morgan? Is that the area where all of the like, I think had Ethiopian food in the Adams Morgan area, Dupont Circle, that.

I mean, it's really that they're pretty close to each other and you can find just about any cuisine.

Yeah, I mean, obviously we're talking about ingredients. So the well, which is you can find on the Internet. Eat well ATX in Austin, Texas is a restaurant founded by really Rich and Nicole from. And it's gluten free, dairy free, no seed oils. And you can agree or disagree with that philosophy, but until you eat there and experience the fact that you don't have to have anything like that in your diet and it still tastes great and it's different. And like you said, that doesn't really exist. I think the true food just actually became seed oil free recently. And I, I have nothing negative to say about them. I think it's great. The more kind of restaurants or, or places we Eat, adopt principles that make it healthier. I don't. I'm always aligned with whoever's going to help, like make people healthier. I don't have a dog in that fight. I don't care what your affiliations are. I just want people to eat better and drink better things and, and, and feel better in general. So whatever that form takes. But until you've had some of that, I would not disparage restaurants that help. Help provide that for you. In fact, you could encourage restaurants in your cities and your neighborhoods to do that because I personally made sure that this restaurant wouldn't go out of business by shifting all of my business there and sending all of my patients there. Because that's the way you should eat and you should experience it. Well, now you're five weeks. So what is the next. I always look at things in 90 day intervals. What are kind of some goals for you over the next big it till you're at three months that you want to achieve and then we'll just kind of wrap it up with letting everybody know where to find you.

Yeah. So. Okay. The next 90 days. I am cleared now to start lower body workouts again, not with weights in my upper chest, so resistance bands and just kind of getting that mobility. Same with my upper body so I can start testing to see how far my arms will go comfortably and looking forward to having more just mobility in my upper body. I've behaved and followed the instructions and kept my arms below my shoulders as I much as much as possible. And I think every day is just a surprise to see how and where I'm healing. Right. So I'm. I'm now allowed to do casserole packs on my breast. I noticed a difference almost within days of just the softness of tissue that was inflamed or. And so it's just cool. I think it's a discovery process a lot like leading up to this surgery with talk therapy and really digging into why I made the initial decision to begin with and the grief that I had to go through before I actually got to the plant date. I thought I didn't realize how much work I had done until I got to your office, got through the surgery and was able to look at my body one day post op with compassion and love and like almost like excitement for what's to come. And I was very intentional in that post op phase to not delay seeing where I was at day one. And I think, you know, how much you all share online and, and how transparent you are about just this is the process also really equipped me to have the proper expectations. I didn't expect to come out looking a year post op and everything to be great, but it looked good, you know. And I remember Millie, who's on your staff, she said, do you want, do you want to look at. And I was like, girl, give me that mirror. Like, let's take these bandages off. Let's just take a look. And I was like, all right, it's not that bad. I mean, it's one day. It looks pretty decent for one day. And so that's the attitude I wanted to have throughout this process is like compassion for the. A 30 year old me that took care of herself in the best way she knew how back then. Right. And for me, that initial decision was a, was one rooted out of thinking I was caring for myself in the best way possible. And then now seven, eight years later, it's, it's almost like a full circle moment of like, I'm enough in this body and I didn't need that to begin with. And it was, it was self esteem, it was cultural expectations, it was not knowing how to properly fuel and, and feed myself and work out. I've learned the value of weightlifting over the last few years and that really changed my body that if I had known that seven or eight years ago, man, I could have probably been in a different place. And so it's, it. I think ultimately at the end of this, it's been this cocoon of just safety, right? From the way that your team has showed up, from the way my therapist has shown up to, even the way my husband has cared for me. I mean, we talked about this pretty candidly during our time together in Austin. But, but not all husbands are made equal. And I'm so lucky and grateful to have a husband who has loved me and, and encouraged me and spoken kindness over me in this process that I think had that been missing, this would have been really hard if his, if his encouragement wasn't there. And I remember when I first came to him and presented this idea, I mean, I was nervous, I was worried he would be frustrated that, well, why did we go through all that to you now wanting to undo it? And it took probably two conversations. The first one, I think he was thrown off. The second one he said, okay, if this is the path you want to take and you feel like this is part of what's causing all of these issues of the last few years, like, I'm game, let's figure it out together. But there was so much shame and like the money I wasted, quote unquote, wasted for our family. And now knowing that this was going to be an investment as well in my health moving forward. It's just you're carrying a lot in this decision. It's not just the decision to expand. That's, that's just like the one day thing that happens. It's actually so much more complex than that.

I'm glad you put it that way. I mean, we've had some really, as I mentioned, some specific problems develop by not either the conversations that, that were happening before they, they met us. First of all, nobody wants to come see me and everybody listening should know. I don't ever tell anybody to get explanation, whether it's Kathy or anybody else who, who engages with us. They've already decided they're going to do that. I'm just trying to help give information possible so they can make the decision that aligns with them. Like I don't tell anybody to get an explant surgery. First of all, nobody wants to come here and get that done. Very time consuming. I'm not the easiest person in the world to work with. You have to fall into and do a lot of things to get into the system. And I don't bend my system really for anybody because I don't care. I don't have to. I know what works and I, I don't want on the back end somebody who hasn't put in the work. Kathy has to not get the out outcome. So I'm trying to help as much as possible. But having a supportive family, spouse, partner, whoever's going to be someone you can rely on. I get very nervous if people show up without help and we discourage that. We know there's logistics and this is a. I always, I always joke with everybody. My son lives in Spain. Spain fits inside Texas where we, where I am right now. So we have this huge country and it's very hard to get resources outside of the bigger cities. And I'm in a medium sized city, I'm in Austin, I'm not in a huge city. But we've curated what we feel are the best modalities to treat. Obviously there's a surgical part of it, like you mentioned, but then I have this team that we've developed to, at every level of the organization, someone's had an explant so they can communicate with patients in a way I can't. And then I have a detox group led by one of my explant patients, Chelsea. So there's not somebody who doesn't Understand or hasn't experienced what our patients are experiencing. All I can say is like, on the husband part, it's great when I meet a spouse who's engaged and wants to help and is trying to do their best. Like, guys are a little flighty, they can be really good caregivers, or they can be just like petrified during the headlight. We would try to make everything easy, right. I don't use drains on patients. We have this really elegant, elaborate situation where we do pre op pain control, nerve blocks by anesthesia, nerve blocks by me. We're trying to make it super simple so that basically they're an Uber driver. You know, that's kind of it. Get to point A and point B without an accident. That's basically the goals here. The rest of my team will take care of in Austin. You don't really, you're not going to be called on to be a nurse. It's just more about like, can you help with a medication if Kathy needs it, can you get her from the hotel or Airbnb to my office without a problem? That's really it. And if we need to white glove it, we can do that for, for folks who don't have that. But that emotional support is more important that Kathy is talking about.

Yeah, it's everything. I've definitely felt carried through the process. And again, you guys are candid, right? So if you're looking to, for someone to just hear what you want to hear, that's not your team. It's. You guys are compassionate and present, but you're real. Right. And so I think that's such a valuable part of this equation. Just because my expectations were properly set.

This is not the rainbows and unicorns society at my office. It's the reality. So none of it's straight, straightforward. The process is the process. Everybody's going to go through it differently. I mean, I actually discourage my patients from getting on Instagram and making everything seem like it's this magical process, because that's not going to be the same for every single person. They're all going to start very differently. And then we want everybody to end up rainbows and unicorns. That would be great, but I know it's, it's going to be a different start and a different game for each person. And it's cliche, but it's definitely not a sprint. Well, I know you have a great company that I think we should go ahead and do a pitch for, especially if you wanted to get more clients. So this has been a great conversation with Kathy. So I'll let her describe kind of how to get in touch with her if you want to learn more about what she offers or maybe contact her with questions. Questions about her experience.

Yeah, so the best way to connect with me would be on Instagram. It's oh yes, Kathy. And then the name of our company is OES Communications. You can find us our website or through social media. The our marketing agency specializes in messaging and helping companies communicate with clarity so they connect with their audiences both inside and outside their business. And so we do that in a number of ways. We do that through ongoing marketing, marketing support, messaging, workshops, consulting, and also video and photo crews. And so we really kind of are a one stop shop for whatever you need. And we travel the country and sometimes outside the country to help businesses do exactly that. And so it's a joy and a pleasure and I'm lucky to do what I do. I love it every day and it's fun. It's a lot of fun.

She's got a big smile. I hope you all can see this. If you're not, if you're just listening, you got to go to the YouTube version of this when it comes out and see how happy she looks. But she actually looks incredibly well with which is the goal for my team's goal is to make everybody as well as possible in as fast a timeframe as possible. So thanks for coming on the show, Kathy. I really appreciate having you.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you found the information and stories shared on this podcast helpful and informative. Remember, taking control of your health and wellness is key to recovery from breast implant illness. If you're looking for additional resources and support, be sure to visit our online store, Dr. Rob's Solutions at drrobsolutions.myshopify.com you'll find a wide range of wellness products and supplements to support your journey to recovery. From specially formulated detox supplements to personalized skincare products, we have everything you need to aid your recovery.

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