Breast Reduction to Alleviate Pain - in the Face

By Charles Downey © 2008
PlasticSurgery.com Staff Writer.

Many women with overly-large breasts suffer from assorted health woes brought on by the extra weight of the breasts. Because the extreme bulk usually causes the woman's frame to be unbalanced, painful problems often develop in her neck and back.

But very large breasts causing facial pain? It actually happened to a patient of Ivan Thomas, M.D. a board certified Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

Breast Reduction

Says R.D. his patient, a now 50-year-old homemaker and mother of two, who asked for her identity to be withheld for privacy:

"I had wanted to have a breast reduction on my large, sagging breasts for quite a while. But it seems like I always had to delay it."

Her oversized breasts had already caused more than enough health complications. Not only were her shoulder bones notched due to the extra heavy weight pressing on her bra straps, she had developed neck and back pain.

"One of my breasts seemed to be heavier and had pulled one of my shoulders down lower than the other," she says. "And that, in turn, put my entire back out of balance."

But perhaps the final straw was the facial pain caused by bra straps which stopped the blood flow in a major artery that supplied nutrients to her face.

"I finally developed paralysis on the left side of my face," says R.D. "And that meant my facial skin was sometimes insensitive to cold while at other times, I felt a burning sensation in that area."

For about five years before the breast reduction surgery, the resulting medical problems caused R.D. to seek help from a neurologist, a rheumatologist, and an orthopedic surgeon.

Breast Sizes

While R.D. estimates she was a "heavy" double D breast size, she requested her breast reduction to be a B cup size.

"However, Dr. Thomas could see a B cup would be too small to suit my frame so I wound up a much lighter D size which eliminated the facial, back and neck pains."

When she first consulted with Dr. Thomas, she found the other three doctors had to agree to the procedure which would be performed in a hospital, with an overnight stay to make sure all her conditions were monitored.

Tummy Tuck

"I also had some hanging flesh on my stomach so I asked Dr. Thomas to perform a tummy tuck during the same surgical session," she says. "He additionally repaired some hernias in my stomach muscles."

Hernias in stomach muscles allow protrusion of an organ -- or parts of an organ -- through the wall of the cavity which normally contains it.

Weakened, stretched stomach muscles are usually one of the side effects of pregnancy and childbirth. Most affected are two long strips of muscles -- the ones that create the so-called "six-pack stomach" -- that run from the lower chest to the pubic region. Pregnancy forces those muscles to part, allowing the contents of the abdomen to bulge forward into the classic pot belly.

"My stomach muscles were so spread apart, I could not do a single sit-up," says R.D. who is a mother of two children. "One doctor said my stomach muscles had parted so far that they rested, not in my middle of my torso but on the sides."

Another thing she intensely disliked: when she sat down, she had to open her pants to allow for the bulging abdomen.

The operation went well except R.D. found she was allergic to the most common post-operation pain killing medications and could only rely on Tylenol. Recovery required about two weeks.

"I'm now pain free and can do all the sit-ups I want," she says. "Plus, my stomach looks so much better, with no hanging skin at all."