Breast Implants Come With Risks – Why Weren’t These Cancer Survivors Warned?

Surviving breast cancer is difficult enough, but some people who have mastectomies then develop breast implant illness after reconstruction surgery.

Eighty-one percent of breast reconstruction surgeries following a mastectomy involve implants,  according to the Department of Health and Human Services, and many doctors recommend them to breast cancer patients without providing much information about other options, including going flat, according to patients and experts interviewed by The Messenger.

Reconstruction using the patient’s own tissue instead of implants is also an option, but the surgery is more complex, Kevin Brenner, M.D., a board certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who specializes in removing breast implants, tells The Messenger.

“The downtime for a breast implant-based reconstruction is less, the recovery is easier than doing a reconstruction with your own tissue, like a tram flap, where they take the tissue from your stomach or from somewhere else on your body and implant it in the breast,” says Dr. Brenner, who no longer does breast implant surgeries due to all of the possible complications, including breast implant illness (BII).

“I'm seeing a lot of breast cancer survivors who are reconstruction patients, who have developed BII as a result of their implants,” he says, adding that the possibility of BII should affect how surgeons talk to their patients about implants.

However, BII is not an official medical diagnosis, and many doctors don’t know or don’t believe it exists, although women have been reporting similar symptoms due to breast implants since the 1990s — including joint pain, rashes, hair loss, extreme fatigue, memory loss, gastrointestinal issues and heart arrhythmias.

Women ‘feel they’ve been put on a conveyor belt’

Amanda Savage Brown, Ph.D., a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in helping women after explant surgery, and a former scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says most doctors automatically assume women who have had mastectomies will want breast reconstruction with breast implants.

“Women tell me they feel they’ve been put on a conveyor belt that takes them directly to implant-based reconstruction,” Dr. Brown tells The Messenger.

“They say, ‘I didn't feel like I had a choice, and it was a given that I was going to reconstruct with implants,’” she says. “Some women don't actually want to reconstruct, they're fine to go flat. But implant-based reconstruction reflects that this body part has been so objectified.”

‘Nobody mentioned staying flat’

“Nobody mentioned staying flat that I remember,” Pati Alexander, who had breast cancer and a double mastectomy in 2009, tells The Messenger.

“I remember specifically asking the doctor if implants were safe; the FDA had taken them off the market for a while and then had just brought them back a couple of years prior to my implant,” Alexander, now 69, recalls. “He told me they had done their own study, they were totally safe, so I had the implants, and everything went fine. They looked great. He put in 475 cc silicone under the muscle, and I was able to do everything.”

Alexander  later developed BII.

“It was in November 2017, and all of a sudden I get tachycardia. I mean, I'm literally watching TV and I get tachycardia [an abnormally rapid heart rate]. Wow. My heart rate just starts going off the chart. It would not come down,” she says. “And so I knew something was wrong, and so I went by ambulance to the hospital and the doctor comes in and says, your thyroid's high.”

Alexander was put on medication for hyperthyroidism, and an endocrinologist suggested taking out her thyroid, which she declined. She was then diagnosed with Graves disease, an autoimmune disorder. Although she took medication and changed to an autoimmune protocol diet that she “followed to the T for over two years,” her antibodies kept rising.

Then, one night, she stumbled across a breast implant illness group on Facebook. The women’s stories were so similar, “I was totally convinced it was the silicone implants. And so I started on my journey to find a surgeon to take them out.”

But Alexander could not find a surgeon that would do an explant on a mastectomy patient in her home state of Texas.

“The doctors that I did call here, the first part of the conversation was that you would have to pay cash [although she was told Medicare should pay for any costs related to her breast cancer diagnoses]. The second part of the conversation was, in a very nice way, ‘We don't work on mastectomy patients.’”

Using the same Facebook group, she found a doctor in Oklahoma who would remove her implants and who took Medicare. Just five months after having the implants removed, her antibodies and thyroid went back to a normal range.

“I feel so normal now and healthy without those things in my body. And there was nothing wrong with the implants. [The surgeon who removed them] said they looked brand new; they weren't ruptured,” she says.

Alexander’s story has a happy ending, but not all women with breast implant illness due to breast reconstruction can get help.

'If you have an issue with the implants, there's nowhere to turn'

“A lot of the women that I've talked to, they were just automatically offered implants for their reconstruction and not offered other choices. And then if you have an issue with the implants, then there's nowhere to turn, many doctors won’t remove them.” Alexander says.

Maryann Bracero was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and had a bilateral mastectomy in 2015.

“When we talked about reconstruction, I asked them, would I be able to use my own fat instead of putting anything else in there. And they told me, no, I wasn’t a candidate because of other health issues I have,” Bracero tells The Messenger. 

Doctors did not give her the option of staying flat.

“I’ve had problems since the day of the [reconstruction] surgery,” Bracero says. 

She was hospitalized with sepsis two weeks after her reconstruction surgery, which doctors were unable to explain, and two years later she was still dealing with fatigue, anemia and Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid. She consulted many doctors, but they dismissed her complaints and suggested she see a psychiatrist.

Then in 2019, the FDA recalled the Allergan implants used in Bracero’s breast reconstruction surgery, so she was able to have them removed. The first surgeon she went to wanted to replace the implants with new ones, but she refused and found another surgeon.

Although she no longer has implants, she is still ill and has daily pain in the reconstruction area.  

“If I could change it, I would've just gone flat,” Bracero says. “I want to get my story out there because I don't want any other woman to be hurt.”