Extreme Breast Reduction Surgery with Free Nipple Graft
21st February 2012Facelift Surgery
Massive breast reduction surgery with over 4 kilos of breast tissue removed from each side and a nipple reconstruction procedure known as free nipple graft technique, performed by plastic and reconstructive surgeon Adrian Richards of Aurora clinics in Buckinghamshire, UK. Aurora's patient had significant back and neck pain and problems with cellulitis infections around the breast area caused by difficulty of blood flow to the nipples, and her breasts were asymmetrical. Her breast size was reduced from H cup to C cup which was a huge change for her and she is now recovering well from the surgical procedure. For more information on Breast Reduction surgery, please call our free office number 0800 3285743 or book a free consultation with any of Aurora's highly specialised plastic and reconstructive breast surgeons.
Transcript
Hello, my name is Adrian Richards. I’m the Clinical Lead of Aurora Clinics. In this video, I’m going to be taking you through a breast reduction operation. Now, this is probably the biggest breast reduction I’ve ever performed, and I do a number of these procedures.
This lady has got an awful lot of extra tissue on her chest. She’s getting rubbing underneath, and she’s having trouble. The blood is having difficulty getting down to the nipple area, and she’s got sores on her breasts as we’ll see in the pictures. So this lady is very debilitated by her breasts. She won’t go out. She finds it very difficult to socialise. She has very bad neck and shoulder pain.
So we are going to perform breast reduction today. I’ll be taking you through each stage. I’m going to use a free nipple graft technique, which is very unusual, and I’ll explain the reasons for that in a minute.
So we’re going to do a breast reduction on this lady, and I think it’s probably the biggest breast reduction I’ve ever done. You can see this lady . . . how tall is she? She’s 5’5″. I don’t know if you can see all these red marks. This is where she’s got edema, and the skin is all breaking down on her breast because the blood supply has got to get down there. It’s so far down. So I’ve got to remove all this tissue here and then reconstruct the breast. I’m going to use the technique of a free nipple graft, which is to take the nipple as a skin graft and replace it.
As you can see on both sides, you’ve got really massive reduction to perform. So, what I’ve done is I’ve actually removed the nipple. Can you see there? So I’ve removed the nipple. I’m going to put it back as a skin graft. So that’s where the nipple was. I don’t know whether you can see that. Can you see that? So I’m going to put that back as a skin graft in a minute. This is called a free nipple graft because you could walk out of the room with that nipple if you wanted to. It’s free from the body.
This is the tissue we’ve removed. As you can see, this is where the nipple was there. That’s where the redness was. This is the tissue we’ve removed. I just want to show you, compared to the breast here. Can you see? That tissue was there. It was really quite heavy. This is another little bit I’ve removed here. So, that is quite heavy, a few kilos I would imagine. We’ll weigh it in a minute.
I’m halfway through the left side here. Can you see the right side there? Abby, do you mind just pushing it. So you can see how much smaller we’ve gotten. What was the weight? 4.6 kilos from the right side, and I’m just going to do the left side now. This is all the tissue I’m removing, and I’ll show you when I’ve removed it all.
So, this is the end of the procedure. I think I removed 4.6 kilograms from this breast, and I’ve just done tie-overs on the nipples, and I removed 4.1 kilograms from that breast. I think it’s probably the biggest breast reduction I can certainly remember doing. It’s all come together really well. I think overall she’s lost, I think, 8.7 kilograms, which is a lot of weight, and the breast tissue was really heavy.
Thanks very much for watching the video and a big thank you to our patient for allowing us to show it. 8.5 kilos is the biggest breast reduction I can remember doing. Normally, most reductions are slightly under one kilo per side. Many patients who have such big reductions find it slightly different to balance afterwards because they had such weight on their front that they have to exercise their back, tense back to keep upright.
So, immediately afterwards, when they sit up and walk around, they tend to lean backwards quite a lot. It takes a couple of days to get used to that. So, I would expect our patient is going to be a lot more comfortable. She’s going to have all that weight removed. She’s going to find it easier in clothes. She’s going to be able to go out socially much better, and hopefully those red ulcerated areas on the breast, which I removed, are completely going to go. So I think it was a really worthwhile operation to do for our lady today.
If you’d like any more information about breast surgery, breast reduction, any other type of surgery, we’ve got a number of surgeons here at Aurora Clinics who specialise in different fields. Please get in contact with us, either via phone or via email. We’d love to hear from you and hear your story.
Thanks very much for watching.