Posted by Dr. D on October 2, 2009, 7:26 am, in reply to "Re: Various Flap Outcomes"
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Dear Lucky,
If you had to have an expander put in, it generally means that a skin sparing mastectomy was only partly done (or that the skin was damaged during mastectomy). By that, I mean that there is no need to expand the skin if none of it was cut away, the implant can simply be put into the preserve skin envelope and closed leaving the shape and volume as it was before the mastectomy started.
So, if you had an expander and/or a significant amount of breast skin was cut off at mastectomy, you might need a skin patch or you might not. We can make a pretty good guess at pre-op, it depends on how pliable the skin is since it generally retracts when a tight implant is removed.
So, sometimes yes, sometimes no. When we have no involvement on the planning for the mastectomy, we have to deal with the circumstances that are presented to us after the fact.
Yours,
Dr. D
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