We Breast Cancer Surgeons are unprotected and vulnerable. We treat breast cancer and protect vulnerable women from the ravages of the disease. Yet we ourselves cannot avoid the awful calamities of life. No better example of this was the recent death of Dr. Jan Huston-Pryor, a Breast Cancer Surgeon from New Jersey. I didn’t know her personally, but knew of her. She was walking her dog one morning recently and was struck by a car and killed. Coincidentally, Dr. Jeanne…

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Last week, the last week of summer, I saw 20 patients who had survived breast cancer. 20 breast cancer survivors from Brooklyn and Staten Island in one week. Terrific. Happy Labor Day for these breast cancer survivors. All 20 had different types of breasts cancer and different stages and different treatments. Some had breast cancer more than once. All were survivors and all had in common an opportunity to mark a new quantum of time over which they had triumphed…

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We have been following Janice Dickinson through her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Ms. Dickinson has been more than open about her silicone breast implants. Thus, we have discussed difficulties in patients with implants regarding diagnosis and surgical treatment. We last checked in with Janice after she was diagnosed and had a lumpectomy and as she was starting radiation therapy. She has likely finished this, although there has been nothing in news reports. She is probably experiencing skin changes from…

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Early in my career, years ago, I had done a lumpectomy on a patient. It didn’t look great afterwards. That happens. She finished her radiation therapy, waited a few months, and then showed in my office with the lumpectomy scar incorporated into a swirling floral tattoo. You couldn’t see the incision. All my work (disappointed as I was with it) was  florally camouflaged. A bad scar into a work of art. I loved it. I wish I had taken a…

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With her implants in place, would I want to be the one performing the lumpectomy on Janice Dickinson for her breast cancer? I don’t know Ms. Dickinson, but there is enough information in the public realm to comment on a few of the surgical issues for the treatment of breast cancer in patients with implants. A few years after replacing her thirty year old implants and enduring a cancer scare at the same time, she developed a real breast cancer…

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Janice Dickinson went public a few months ago about having breast cancer.   It seems that there is a celebrity or public person every week who goes public with their breast cancer story. It shouldn’t be surprising. Celebrities and public figures are not immune from breast cancer. After all, it is the most common form of cancer that women develop What was striking about Janice Dickinson’s public story is that she zeroed in, perhaps unwittingly, on the problems of implants…

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Wednesday is the day I go to the operating room to treat breast cancer. Breast Cancer Removal and Treatment Day. Inevitably, each breast cancer patient will ask, “Doc, did you get a good night’s sleep?” Of course, I appreciate and understand their concern and try to laugh it off saying I was up all night partying and that my hands aren’t very steady…but things will be fine…don’t worry.. I walked away from one of these encounters and had a flash…

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