Treatment Provider

Edward J. Bednar, MD
Board Certified Plastic Surgeon
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3.5 years ago it is still not ended

I got scars - lots of them, they didn't fade like it was promised, very scarred psyche - I still can't date, Dr. Bednar offered money and then refused to give it after I shared what happened in social media. All that was bad and hard to live through but I thought may be this was finally over. Nope. 5 months ago I got a lump in my lymphatic node in the armpit. I was terrified waiting for an appointment and an expertise of possible cancer. It turned out not cancer but an abscess - rejected fat tissue that was inflamed for years or months and finally came out close to the surface. My armpit was cut open, and it's been 3.5 months since I have been hoping it would heal. It hasn't. I don't have a summer again. The 4th year without sunbathing or swimming. I keep changing wound dressings. The wound closes and re-opens within a week with more yellow fluid coming out. A surgeon suggested i got a fistula. I am now to find treatment for this. Have looked on the internet- and it doesn't look promising. It may be a chronic fistula that, if left untreated, can lead to a network of fistulas in the breast and God only knows what's next. Please please please don't do this to yourself. Don't do high volume fat grafting. You can forget peace for the rest of your life.

It's going on the 3rd year – still crushed

Just wanted to put a quick update in. I had 2 more fat transfers (at this point 5). My breast size originally was 34AA, now it is still hardly a full 34A cup. The breasts are still different size, shape, and during the last surgery I had my nipple moved up. It is hard to see the difference in the picture taken from the front – it flattens out the volume but I can see it from my view looking down. The shape is different and even though the new doctor filled in the right breast's cleavage area, the right breast is still sloping down to the right more than the left one. One doctor I saw said that the only way to fix it back up is by moving the entire breast mound under the skin and suturing it to the muscle and it would be a very involved procedure which he refused to preform, thinking just moving the nipple up would fix it. It did not fix it.
It's hard to follow all the comments in the story, so to remind you, after I had my first fat transfer to breast with as Dr. Bednar, my left breast's incisions bursted open and all dead fat leaked out, leaving me with a severe asymmetry. I asked Dr. Bednar if it would be better to drain and scrape the right breast too because asymmetry was unbearable to me. He said he'd make the size even in a couple of months which didn't happen. He tried, but after 1.5 years of his trying the breasts were still uneven shape, size, and full of lumps. Leaving the right breast larger for a long time, made it sag and move in a different direction from the center of the chest wall than where the left breast is, so now even though another surgeon tried lifting it back to the symmetrical position with the left using a Benelli lift, it was not successful. All I got is a big scar around my right nipple and the right nipple stretched.
I know a lot of you will say it looks fine, but that is if you compare me to other people, people who went through cancer treatment or breast explant or .. it's just them. When it comes to you, there is no comparison. I started with a completely clean, symmetrical, scarless body, and I mourn it so much every day of my life for the 3rd holiday season that I don't get to enjoy, and I am so disappointed in the doctors, and in the world that does not protect you from something like this happening.

Another Saturday bawling

During the week I get up, rinse up, put make up on, go to work, deal with what's at hand – probably survival instinct. Weekends are different. Almost every Saturday in the past 1.5 years I wake up crying and checking my breasts out non-stop. I have come across research showing that 1 factor that affects the quality of a woman's life the most after breast cancer surgery is breast asymmetry https://www.youtube.com/watch?vMLp9Uf3_1_k. I can fully attest to that. The asymmetry I got after the fat transfer with Dr. Bednar preoccupies me almost every minute of my waking hours. I do my best to focus on work during the work hours but even in meetings with clients and definitely while working alone I get distracted by thoughts about it and sometimes have to apply mental strength not to start crying.
Today is a Saturday. I am sitting all day at home – crying, reading articles online about different approaches to breast asymmetry correction, looking for something I haven't heard yet that might help me, looking at doctors' "before and after"s – going over some of them for the n-th time. I don't want to go anywhere, don't want to see anyone, and I don't see any point in this life quite frankly until I feel whole again with my breasts being the same size and shape as it was before Dr. Bednar's procedure.
Lots of breast reconstruction doctors have pretty bad cases – women who came to them had entire or big parts of their breasts lost to cancer or they had severe tuberous breast deformities, so their "after" pictures are definitely better than what they started with – I hope they are happy – but in my case, my "before" often looks like their "after". It makes me fear whether it is ever possible to correct smaller asymmetry and deformity like I have, and the fact that mine is a smaller deformity than what you get from cancer doesn't make me feel any better. I did not have cancer. If I had cancer I am sure I would assess the situation differently. In my eyes I am drastically different from what I was naturally like symmetry-wise, and there is advice out there that I learned to live by: never compare yourself to others but strive to be better every day compared to what you were like before. And I am worse than before at no fault of my own. It's upsetting. Very.
My emotional pain may be exacerbated by the fact that I have very well trained eyes – I am a graphic designer, and I may see visual differences more distinctly than people who haven't spend as many years as I did analyzing things with half a pixel precision, but unfortunately I can not put other people's eyes into my head and connect them to my brain, and even if I did – that will take my ability to do my job as well as I do away. No one is perfectly symmetrical, I understand, but the way I was before was good enough for me, and now the difference is way more visible.
I don't know if this long rant is gonna be helpful to anyone. For me it may give me a little bit of an emotional relief. For you – I guess, you should know that Fat Transfer procedure has a risk of creating an asymmetry and it is way more agonizing to have it than what you may have thought when you didn't have it.

Provider Review

Board Certified Plastic Surgeon
439 N. Wendover Rd., Charlotte, North Carolina
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