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I remember the exact day that I found the lump. I definitely didn't want to have a surgery. I didn't want to have a scar.
There it is. It's fully engulfed. We're never going to see it again. Ever.
Today's show is all about learning what your body is trying to tell you. But the truth is, sometimes you have to look in a good example of this, Lisa, is...
Self-breast exams. They are so, so, so important. This is an example here of the different sizes of masses that women will find on self-breast exams.
And this is the 21 millimeter size. I want you to feel that. Because that's what an average woman will feel a breast mass in her breast.
And you would have to be paying attention...
Right. To doing your self-breast exam. We teach women how to do it. We tell you to go up and down or round like a target, but really it's all about knowing your body.
Because it's so, so very important to do your self-breast exam. Because if you don't, you may miss something. I cannot tell you as a gynecologist how many women have found their own breast masses by doing their self-breast exam and then they come in.
Because we do, you know, as clinicians, we do it only once a year. So the surveillance that they do every month, you know, about five days after their period is huge.
You can actually save lives. Now what they've said in the past about maybe you shouldn't do it is because sometimes you may find most of these are benign.
Well, most of the time you're going to hope that they're benign. But if you miss the ones that aren't benign, you're going to want to have done your exam so that you'll catch the ones that are cancerous.
And certainly some lumps are more concerning than others. And when Stacy found a lump, she didn't know what it was.
I remember the exact day that I found the lump. I was in the shower. Everything flushed before me.
Thinking my kids aren't going to have a mom. I remember even reading my kids' stories over that period and thinking how important that moment was.
I went to the doctor. I had a biopsy done and about three days later the results came in.
And my doctor told me that it wasn't cancer and that the breast lump was benign. I was definitely very relieved and I knew I wanted it to be out.
We went over her options. One is keeping an eye on it. The other is surgery. And the third would be cryoablation. You all ready?
Yeah, I'm ready to get this.
Taking care of?
Yeah. I definitely didn't want to have a surgery. I didn't want to have a scar.
Cryoablation refers to cryo, which is freezing. And then ablation, when we're ablating tissue, it's just destroying tissue and reabsorbed by the body.
So the scarring is little to none.
So there it is. That's about 1.3 centimeters.
Now I'm going to start putting numbing notes in. All the way up to the fibradenoma, through it, above it, and below it.
The importance of doing this with the sonocyte is that it can be incredibly precise. We're going to start freezing it.
It cools the tissue down to minus 160 degrees Celsius. Cells cannot survive that degree of cold. And all you see there is ice ball. That means that it's fully engulfed.
We're ever going to stay again. Ever.
Better than surgery, right?
Much better than surgery.
Dr. Deanna, Ty's here with Stacy today. It's three weeks after your procedure, right?
Yeah.
How do you feel?
Amazing. I feel back to normal.
Did you have a scar or anything like that?
There's like a little dash. That's it. There's nothing there.
Ty, you can't even see it.
That's all that's amazing is if you look at the pictures, we have a still image of the scar from cryoablation next to a lumpectomy.
And it literally, you can barely see it when you compare it to the traditional lumpectomy.
The scarring is little to none.
And even though we try and be much more cosmetic with our lumpectomies and leave as little scarring as possible, there's no way as a surgeon I could take out a lump, even as small as hers was,
through such a tiny scar in the operating room.
So the procedure is really just amazing for these types of tumors.
This is just great. I mean, and you're going to keep doing yourself breast exams, right?
Absolutely. I would never have known if I hadn't checked and I check all the time. I think it's extremely important.
Yeah, it's huge.
And it's also being used for other things?
Absolutely. Cryoablations, we're studying that for use in small breast cancers.
So just like in Stacey's case, where we did not have to take her to surgery for her benign tumor, we are getting to the point where small breast cancers, we may not have to take women to the operating room for that.
Right, so keep doing yourself breast exams.
This is great stuff.
Continue good luck to you. Thank you both for joining us.
Thank you very much. And there's more information on Clare O'Brien.
