Dr. Robert Whitfield removed a breast implant to check for cancer recurrence. Pathology came back clear, but cultures revealed a massive E. coli infection with over 100,000 colony-forming units, showing how foreign bodies like implants can harbor serious bacterial biofilms.
Of course, I'm trying to do everything and take it out intact because if you're gonna have a cancer recurrence, it's usually at the scar in a breast cancer case. Mm-hmm. Or the tissue associated with the scar underneath it. So you excise the scar, you take it out altogether. And so when it comes out and the pathologist looks at it, they can actually make sure that everything, uh, is in order. And also you take cultures of the area when you remove it because As we all know, implants are foreign and they can become infected, frankly infected or contaminated with biofilm. Okay. So I take everything out and on her one-week follow-up, I see her and she's doing very well. And we're going through the pathology. There's no evidence of recurrent cancer, which is obviously great. And then I look at her microbiology report. And she has an E. coli infection. Not a smattering of E. coli, a true— Crapload. A medical crapload infection. And just so the audience knows, for a hospital to identify that, there is greater than 10 to the 5th or 100,000 bacteria in that sample. And so I was pretty taken aback by that.
