Hot off the press! Beth Greenfield’s article for Yahoo Life about the great strides flat advocacy has made in recent years! Let’s keep up the good work to #putflatonthemenu and make sure women are empowered to advocate for their choice – #aestheticflatclosure!
From the article:
“People didn’t know what to ask for and we didn’t know what to offer them,” Dr. Pankaj Tiwari, plastic surgeon specializing in breast reconstruction in Gahanna, Ohio, tells Yahoo Life. “We would offer it without the vocabulary. But I think ‘aesthetic flat closure’ is a nice encapsulation of what patients should be seeking if they want flat closure.” Tiwari, who reached out to Bowles early on in her protesting after reading a story about her, says he was eager “to solicit opinions from people who spent a lot of time thinking about it,” and by doing so, has learned quite a bit about how to approach the procedure.
This beautiful, powerful awareness video was made by and for the flat community with the hope it reaches far and wide. “Stand Tall” this breast cancer awareness month and support research for a cure. Produced by Flat Retreat, @LessThanTwoBreasts, Linkage Beauty Movement and @StatisticalOddity. View in HD here.
[October 7th] The advocates at Ablatio Mammae – selbstbewusst ohne Brust have an incredible new podcast out! In today’s International FLAT Day episode, host Kerstin Grotelüschen discusses aesthetic flat closure, flat visibility and informed consent with guests from around the globe. Listen at the AMSOB website!
SELECTED TRANSCRIPT (more to come): “Let’s talk about what aesthetic flat closure means. For me, it was just the way you did a mastectomy. Now I want people to know that people aren’t trained [in] that in general surgery. When I went through general surgery training, we were blessed with a breast surgical oncology fellowship at our institution, so the third year residents would rotate with the breast service for about two and a half months. So on that service, you learned how to do mastectomies, lumpectomies – it depended on what surgeon you were with, with how well they closed the chest wall. And most of our women did get reconstructions. So, when I became a fellow, the surgeons that I worked with trained us [but] it’s not a formal technique that you do.
“Being cognizant of how much tissue you have left on that patient – what we call medially and laterally, medially means closer to the sternum or the breast bone, and laterally is near the axilla or under the arm – so if you look at some women who have had mastectomies without reconstruction (or they’ve had the implants removed), sometimes you’ll see tissue left near the sternum. It looks like a dog ear – we call it a dog ear. Or you’ll see a lot of tissue – we call it “redundant tissue” – where the tissue kind of billows out, or kind of sinks in, especially after an implant has been removed. And so if you want to wear a prosthesis after you’ve had the implant removed, it’s not going to fit very well against a chest wall with all that excess skin, plus it will become irritated. And then a lot of ladies will complain of under the arm with all that fatty tissue, it’s hard to put the arm down, it’s unsightly, it doesn’t fit into your post-mastectomy bra very well. So it’s having an aesthetic eye, to understand that that tissue needs to go.”
