Numbness after surgery
Dr Bheem says, “Your breast is above your chest. In mastectomy what we do is we go under the skin and take out your breast. In the keyhole, we take it out from the skin. So all your nerves come from the chest to the skin, and during the course of the surgery, they are cut off. So in the beginning it will go all numb. Then it will take 6 to 8 months for the sensation to come back. In Double Incisions especially, what we do is we take out the entire breast from the body, and then we cut the nipple back in size and put it back as a stamp so that there might be a normal sensation. Take for instance after a keyhole or Double Incision, the sensation will come back to you but the erotic sensation won’t return there. As we all know there is an erotic sensation in the nipples, so that will not come back.”
Swelling
So the basics of selling have been described really well by Dr Bheem wherein he says, “swelling is of two types:
- The first is surgical swelling and the other is complication-related swelling. Surgical swelling, so see when anyone has a heavy chest so I am doing a double incision and I cannot make them wear a binder for 10 days because the nipple area has a dressing and you cannot put a binder from above that so you cannot do that because then it will turn into a depression in the chest cavity. So till 10 days there can be some swelling in your chest but this is just surgical swelling, it is because there have been so many cuts and stuff so it is happening.
- And the other type of swelling is when you have done a keyhole or double incision and there has been an accumulation of blood so we call that hematoma. This is the second complicated infection in mastectomy, so hematoma is when there is bleeding on the inside and if there is swelling and so we have to treat that. If it is a lot then we have to take the patient to the OT and then we have to open it up a few cm and take out all the blood. So I have done so many cases till now but I have only had it happen to me with two patients that I took them to the OT from 400. So in the OT, I had to cut a small incision and take out all the blood that was there through that. That is called a hematoma.”