Numbness, zings, sharp pains. What should I expect after breast surgery?
What will my sensation be after breast surgery? Shockingly, the course is pretty consistent for most patients, but it is always a risk. If I meet someone who says they would be devastated if they had any change in breast sensation with surgery, I tell them don’t do surgery. There is always a risk. Thankfully the risk tends to be low, and most women end up about where they started. What I generally see:
- Numbness for the first few weeks. This is something you don’t tend to notice. What you do notice is when the nerves start to wake up. If your nerves come back sooner, good for you! Everyone is different.
- Around three weeks out: The nerves wake up. Hello nerves. This can be anything: itching, soreness, zings of pain, a sharp stabby pain, hypersensitivity, weird sensations, “it feels like when I was pregnant/breast feeding/milk came in”, or the nipples are high beaming and you want to go crazy. This tends to come on, then get to be really annoying and frequent, and then slowly go away again. Do not worry. This is normal.
-
- This process takes weeks to months to fully go through its course.
- There is no medication which will help
- Not irritating the breasts helps. This means cover your nipples if they are super sensitive. If you had a reduction, wear your bra to help lessen swelling. If you get hot and sweaty, swollen, etc you will irritate the nerves more.
- Swelling and irritation = making the nerves more angry = more nerve symptoms.
-
- When will I know what my sensation will be? Most of my patients return to normal sensation within a few months. If you don’t have good sensation right out of the gate, don’t worry. Nerves can take up to a year to fully recover.
Other thoughts?
For breast augmentation, your sensation change does not vary with where you make the cut. It is affected by how big you go. The more you stretch the skin, the more changes you can have. You cannot see the nerves when doing an augmentation- they were not cut. . They were stretched. It is not common to have long term changes, but it can happen.
For breast reduction, your nerves are in the pedicle which brings blood supply to the nipple. The bigger the reduction, the more the chance you could have changes. Most women end up with about the same sensation they started with. I have had some patients for whom the nipple was an erogenous zone, where they can feel after surgery but say it is no longer connected to “down there.” I have had some large breasted women who were droopy, where doing the reduction (which also lifts the breast) took the nerves off tension, and they actually got BETTER sensation following breast reduction.
When you look at your areola after surgery you will see it looks flat and shiny at first. This almost always correlates to you still having numbness. When the areola starts to crinkle again that shows you the nerves are returning (which causes the muscle fibers in the areola to contract). Know your sensation is likely coming right behind.
Everyone is different. Nerves are tricky creatures, and they can do weird things and take a long time to come back. But know they almost always do.