Hello this is my first post . Although I have read lots of useful advice on this forum I couldn’t bring myself to post any of my worries until now. It somehow made it seem too real!!
I had a MX last year with an immediated LD Flap reconstruction. I am now booked in for nipple surgery, where the surgeon intends to graft a piece of my existing nipple onto the reconstructed side. It seems such a small procedure in comparison to previous but I wondered if anyone else has had a successful graft.
Hi Louise and welcome to the BCC forums
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Take care
Lucy
Hi Louise, welcome to the forum and to plenty of advice and support.
I spotted your post as I am now just four weeks from a nipple reconstruction made with a free skin/fat graft onto my LD reconstruction. This was the method used because my remaining nipple is too tiny to share (“there’d be nothing left” on the words of my surgeon) and because I’d had whole breast radiotherapy, a skate or t-flap wasn’t viable in the surgeons view. Obviously this is not the same procedure as you will be having, but I wanted to reassure you that it was painless, and my surgeon explained all she was doing as she went along.
The whole thing, including explanation, paper work filling and her going off to scrub up took around an hour, was all done under local and I went for a nice cuppa and a cake straight afterwards!! Care for the new nipple has been easy, and it is settling really well now, so hopefully the surgeon will be happy when she sees me in a couple of weeks time, and then I can go on the list for tattoooing and it’ll be done.
Very best wishes for your little op and hope you get a fantastic result.
Hi Louise,
I had the same procedure a couple of years ago. It was very successful. They took about 1/3 of my remaining nipple (it was a large nipple; any more would have been to big to ‘take’ as a graft). They took a conical section out of the middle of the nipple, put this on the recon, and I think (from memory - can’t really remember anymore!) they put a stitch into the remaining nipple to close up the area where the graft had been taken from. Because they did not touch the ‘sides’ of the nipple (only the end) for the conical section, there has been no loss of sensation in my remaining nipple. The cosmetic result is very good (including the tattoo). My two daughters - now 18 & 23 - are constantly amazed at how good it looks.
Dear RevCat,
Thanks for that. It is reassuring to know that it has been successful for you. I will report back after the event.
I was happy with the result of my LD flap surgery although my back wound took a months to heal.
One of the reasons for not posting anything before is that I didn’t require either Chemo or Radiotherapy. I only had surgery to get over and I felt that was trivial compared to some other users of this site. I think the emotional journey is similar for everyone though. I had an Oncotype DX test which came back advising that Chemo would not be of any benefit to me.
Dear RoadRunner,
That sounds amazing. I have already had the tattoo, done by the plastic surgeon who will do this procedure for me so this is the final stage - hopefully.