I Am Having A Mastectomy and Autologous Reconstruction

So let's, if we could begin, let's just start with an overview.

Can someone please tell me what is autologous reconstruction? Yeah.

Michelle? Okay.

Well,

autologous reconstruction, I agree.

It is really hard for people to sort of understand.

I've always used the analogy of like an internal transplant.

So we'll work backwards from there.

So Any part of any tissue on your skin, any tissue that you have, which includes skin and the subcutaneous fat underneath it, in any part of your body has blood vessels that supply it.

And if you think about this, like, again, with our trunk of a tree sort of analogy, right? Like the branches of the tree are going into the skin and into the fat.

But as you go deeper, they coalesce into a larger trunk, right? Right.

So every territory, whether it be on your chest, on your thigh, on your head, those little branches are going to come together to a bigger trunk and that's going to get to a bigger trunk and to a bigger trunk.

Right.

So autologous reconstruction is the idea of taking the tissue, finding the blood vessels that go to that tissue, tracing them back to a blood vessel that's large enough.

And then taking all that together as one composite piece.

So when you lift it off, you think of the you see the tissue and you see the blood vessels going down to a single trunk, just like a tree.

So so the tissue is the leaves and the trunk is the blood vessel.

And what we're doing is we're taking that.

And so now we've taken the tissue with its blood vessels.

Remember, that's an artery and a vein.

Blood going in, blood going out.

Yep, blood going in, blood going out.

And we're going to find a blood vessel in the area where we want to move it to.

We're going to isolate those blood vessels.

In this case, it would be the chest.