Bec Donlan is a New York City–based personal trainer, a fitness influencer, and the founder of Sweat With Bec. After suffering from a variety of ailments and breast implant illness symptoms for the past 11 years, she made the difficult decision to remove the implants she loved earlier this month. This is her story, edited for length and clarity.
I was born with pectus excavatum, which is a concave chest wall. Growing up, people would always say they could see my ribs or ask why my chest looked the way it did. It really messed with my head and made me so self-conscious. My brother was also born with it, and he got an operation where they put metal rods in his chest. It was so barbaric. But the other alternative for me was breast augmentation, and I thought, Well, great, that sounds amazing—what a win!
When I was 22, I got the Biocell textured implants, which were sold to me as the Rolls-Royce of breast implants. I absolutely loved them and was immediately so much more confident and happy. Everything was good for three years, and then I suddenly woke up one morning with an insane amount of fluid around one of my implants—that breast was twice the size of the other. I went to the ER and got an MRI and an X-ray, but the doctors couldn’t tell me what was wrong and just gave me antibiotics. A couple of years later, the same thing. The doctors said it was probably a bacterial infection and that I’d be fine, but it kept happening every two years.
I was also having all these crazy stomach problems ever since I got the implants put in, but I didn’t think of the two as related at all. Being in the health and wellness industry, I know that women’s allergies can change every few years, so I figured I was just developing new allergies and cut out sugar, gluten, dairy, and grains. I barely ate meat. I did regular detoxes. And my gut was still a mess.
I’m 33 now—and over the past two years, my health got even worse. I had chronic fatigue and periods of not being able to get out of bed or lift my limbs. I felt like I was hungover and had been partying all night. I couldn’t function or think clearly without an Adderall. I wasn’t sleeping; my skin was a mess; my hair was falling out; I was getting numbness down my left side for no reason. I worked out twice a day and gained 25 pounds. I felt like I was going insane, so I found this biohacking doctor who did all my blood and stool work and found that I have Hashimoto’s disease. My thyroid levels were insanely low, and my liver was completely out of whack. I was missing enzymes that break down food, which was why I couldn’t digest anything.
I had heard of breast implant illness, but I thought it sounded like bullshit—and to be honest, I didn’t care, because I really loved my boobs and didn’t want to give them up. An implant can cause stomach issues? Fine, then I just won’t eat gluten forever! That was my mentality. I would put up with any issue to keep my boobs.
Related: The FDA Recommends New Warnings for Breast Implants
But in July 2019, I found out that my implants had been recalled. I reached out to my original plastic surgeon, and he was like, “You’re fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, don’t take them out for no reason.” I contacted the manufacturer for more info, and that was useless too, so I put it on the back burner. Then, in October, I woke up and my implant was inflamed again. I went back to the ER and had every test possible; the docs said there was no medical explanation, despite the buildup of fluid. One doctor finally said, “All I’m going to tell you is, you need to get your implants taken out ASAP.”
I asked if it was related to breast implant illness, and he told me it wasn’t a medically recognized disease and that most people have some of the symptoms because they’re day-to-day ailments. But I had every single one. It seemed like there was some kind of conspiracy against me; I was just so confused. I started doing more research into BII and seeing how many women were experiencing exactly the same issues I was, and it just hit me: I was being an idiot, and I needed to address this. I loved my implants, but I had to choose health over aesthetics.
The BII movement is really extremist, and I don’t necessarily agree with it. I love aesthetics, and they’re anti-everything. There are only 30 or so doctors in the United States that BII groups approve of and who will do the en bloc procedure, which is where they take out your implant and the capsule as a whole. The theory is that if your body is already reacting to your implants and you leave any part of the capsule, there will still be silicone biofilm on it that will cause problems. But it seems like some of these doctors take out your entire chest wall just to say they did it, for the Instagram photo. They’re ruining chests and then walking away.
I wanted to find a doctor who was really good at this but wasn’t doing it to be part of a movement and would keep my best interests in mind. I wanted the capsule out, but if it was only 98% removed because the other 2% would cause irreparable muscle damage, that was okay with me. That’s why I chose Dr. T. Y. Steven Ip [a board-certified plastic surgeon in Newport Beach, California]. He made me feel really reassured. Other doctors told me they wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t look good. One even said, “You’ve got a Sports Illustrated body and I’m going to leave you looking terrible, so I’m not doing it.” Dr. Ip was honest about the fact that it wasn’t going to look great, but we made a plan to take the implants out, let my body heal and my skin bounce back over three to four months and then look into fat transfer options. I think it would be too irresponsible of me to get implants again.
[Dr. Ip says, “The term ‘en bloc’ has become a marketing buzzword for plastic surgeons. For patients who desire removal of their breast implants because of concerns of BII, the full capsulectomy and avoiding spillage of silicone would be as aggressive as you need to be. For Bec, because of her recurrence of seromas and having a thick capsule, I performed a complete capsulectomy with removal of the breast implants.”]
Seeing myself after the explant was… a lot. It’s not cute—it’s a very deflated-looking situation. But it was crazy how much better I felt right away. Literally three hours after surgery, the whites of my eyes were brighter than they had been in years because they weren’t carrying that toxic load anymore. My skin tone is better, and friends who have seen me say I look younger. Another thing is that for the past two years, when I was lying in bed with my phone, my left side would always go numb and I couldn’t feel three of my left fingers. The day after I got my implants out, I was in bed on my computer for two hours and didn’t go numb.
I decided to share my journey on social media, because I thought that if I had seen someone like me going through this a year ago—someone who loves aesthetics and wasn’t a BII extremist—I would have looked into an explant sooner and paid more attention to everything that was happening to me. I also opened up for my mental health. My body is online a lot because of my job, and this was obviously going to be a big physical change. If I hadn’t made this public, I probably wouldn’t have left my apartment. It’s a way of holding myself accountable and making myself not feel ashamed. Everyone’s so scared of talking about aesthetics—but the more you do, the more you normalize things.
