Quick blog, but if you are 35 or older, before getting any kind of breast surgery you should have a mammogram. Why?
1. We are changing your breasts.
The amount of your breast change varies. If you are a breast augmentation under the muscle, then the change to the actual breast tissue will be minimal, particularly if you do the incision in the inframammary fold.
If you are a breast lift or breast reduction, I really am moving your tissue around when I do the surgery. Before we go doing all the changing, we want to make sure there isn’t something we are watching on mammogram.
2. If you have anything they are following on mammogram, I have the opportunity to remove it when doing the surgery.
I did this twice in the last week. One patient had five areas they had been watching on mammogram for years…. likely benign growths. Every year, every mammogram measuring them and seeing if anything had changed. When I was doing her breast lift, I get to see and feel the tissue in a completely unique way. Even for her deep lesions, they were easy to find and I removed them all. (And sent them to pathology and all were normal, as suspected.)
Another patient had a lesion which was hard to image due to its location in the breast. (Your breast tissue extends all the way into the armpit.) I did a breast reduction on her and included the area in my sample. No more worrying.
3. Your next mammogram will need to be months after your breast surgery. Anyone who has had a mammogram knows the *ouch* way the mammogram *yikes* squishes the tissue. This is not something you should be doing to a newer surgery. So you should have a mammogram prior to surgery. Then you have time to heal well before your next one.