Video Transcript
I’m Sherry. My surgeon is Dr. Brian Pinsky. Back in May of 2015, I happened to come home and the first thing you do is you take your bra off, get the bra off and do one of these, and I found a lump. So I worked for a practice, a cardiac practice, at the time. And the first thing I did was I went to my doctor and I said to him, “I feel a lump.” And he sent me down, we worked in a hospital setting at the time, so when I went down he sent me mammo, sono, CAT scan, and it turned out I had seven masses.
Dr. Patel sent me upstairs to see the breast surgeon. And with that, she looked through the films and said the mass, which was the bigger one was uncontained. So I asked her, “What are my options?” She said, “We could do a couple of things.” I said, “Okay, well, what’s the top three?” She said, “One, we can biopsy it but if it is cancer, you’re going to die on my table.” I said, “Okay, well what’s option number two.” She said, “Well, option number two is you could wait six months.” I said, “Okay, but if it’s cancer, what’s going to happen?” She said, “Well, probably going to die.” I said, “Okay, well what’s option number three then?” And she said, “You could get a double mastectomy, you have a huge breast cancer history.” My mom had breast cancer. Her sister had breast cancer. My first cousin had breast cancer. And having the history in my family, I didn’t stop to think, really. I went in for surgery two weeks later.
I had really nobody to talk to because my family was going through a lot. My sister-in-law was on hospice. My mom, I felt, couldn’t take another piece of pain for herself. So I called my cousin two days before who had survived breast cancer and said, “You’re going to take me for surgery.” At that time I didn’t know Dr. Pinsky, I didn’t really know anything about anything. And honestly, I wish I met Dr. Pinsky six years ago.
I was having problems with my implants, I felt something weird. My implant was just rock hard. They sent me for a stat CT, and it was a problem. Dr. Pinsky said you need reconstruction. Wen he sat with me, he listened to me, which, to me, that’s why that’s why Dr. Pinsky is amazing because he listened to me. He listened to me and we worked things out and he did what was best for me as a patient. Where it wasn’t done. And I said, “If you do implants again, what is going to happen?” He said, “We’ll probably be really revisiting this again. So he gave me the option and he told me, this is what we can do.
So what Dr. Pinsky did was he removed my implants and he did the total reconstruction. So what he did was called a trans flap. So he removed the tissue all from my abdomen area, and he created breasts from my body, and he did a reduction. He did what I wanted originally, and he made me feel human again. It changed everything for me. And that was important to me, because you go through all this stuff, getting implants that I didn’t even want, I wasn’t even happy about and was so upset coming out with double D implants when I begged her for a C size chest, I’m not even five feet tall. And then this time coming out and knowing that it’s going to be everything that I wanted. And it was just amazing and comfortable, and it’s mine, there’s nothing fake in there. I don’t have to worry anymore. I actually can go to sleep at night and feel good about myself. So my future, I could see my kids get married and I could just live my life. And that’s all thanks to Dr. Pinsky.
