About this item
More than 100,000 American women undergo mastectomy and breast reconstruction every year because of breast cancer. Thousands more are having double mastectomies to prevent it. So much has been written about breast cancer, and so much overlooks the reality of reconstruction when a woman has a mastectomy and opts for this process. It is difficult, painful, and traumatizing at times. Most women do not emerge with a new set of breasts and nipples in a single operation. Breast reconstruction usually takes months and can take years to finish. Some women never do, living without nipples or with imperfect results. Others opt not to have reconstruction at all. Still others struggle with one of the biggest womens health questions today: lumpectomy and radiation or mastectomy?Breast Cancer Surgery and Reconstruction offers a glimpse into the big picture of the various stages and types of breast reconstruction using stories and photos of real women. It offers a true picture of what breast reconstruction entails, and offers hope to those facing it. This is a book to help women with a variety of issues surrounding their choices, with powerful insights from women who have been there.
About the Author
Patricia Anstett is an experienced medical writer who worked 40 years in newspaper journalism in Chicago, Washington D.C. and Detroit, her hometown. She spent the last 22 years of her professional newspaper career as medical writer for the Detroit Free Press, retiring from the Free Press in September, 2012. She was inducted in 2017 into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame, and named Headliner of the year by the Association for Women in Communications.
Breast cancer and women's health are a top focus of her long career. Her award-winning stories centered on poor mammography quality; the silicone breast implant controversy of the 1990s; the introduction of modern breast biopsy options; lumpectomy and radiation advances; tissue-transfer methods for breast reconstruction; and genetic testing for women with a high risk of inherited breast and ovarian cancer.
Her front page story about how two-thirds of Detroit-area mammography facilities flunked a state inspection was credited by state officials for significant improvements in mammography quality in Michigan. For more than 10 years, she and the American Cancer Society's Great Lakes division produced an annual mammography guide in the Free Press on mammography that reported pricing and inspection failure data for several hundred mammography centers in metro Detroit.
When complaints began to surface in the late 1980s silicone breast implants, the most common method used for breast reconstruction, Anstett began reporting on problems with the devices and she covered federal hearings that led to a moratorium on them in 1991. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the largest group of board-certified specialists in the field, honored her work in 1995 with an unsolicited national award.
The year before, she also received the Vivian Castlebury Award, a national competition honoring top reporting on women's issues, for her coverage of new breast biopsy options. Her breast cancer reporting also has won awards from the American Cancer Society and the Barbara Karmanos Cancer Institute of Detroit.
Anstett gained further knowledge of cancer, heart disease and other health and medical issues at more than a dozen national and international health fellowships, including one in genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; another on cultural diversity in health care at the famed Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria; and another in women's health at Case Western University. She mentored more than a dozen journalists in her newspaper career, mostly through the Kaiser Public Health Reporting Fellowship.
Anstett is the co-author of "Triumph: Inspirational Stories from Beaumont'' published in 2015 by the Beaumont Health System She was part of a reporting team that published "The Suicide Machine," a 1997 Free Press book about the first 47 patients to seek help from the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
Her freelance articles over the year
