The FLAT Podcast
Stephanie Astalos Jones, who shared her story with NPOAS last year, recently launched her project Flat Is Where It’s At – a podcast for and about flatties. Stephanie explains where her inspiration came from:
None of us said, “Man, I wish someone would cut my boobs off.”, but since cancer came along and we didn’t want foreign objects shoved into our chest cavities, we find ourselves livin’ the flat life. Or, maybe we DID choose implants and found pain and disease there, so had them removed and we’re livin’ flat now. Or, maybe we found that we had a gene that made us very likely to get cancer, so we preemptively had our breasts removed. However we got here, we find that being flat comes along with very specific problems, weird situations, and wonderful freedoms. Here we discuss them all.
Talking with Metro Surgical Associates
For her mid-September episode of the podcast, Stephanie sat down with the esteemed Drs. Yara Robertson and Rogsbert Phillips-Reed of Metro Surgical Associates in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss flat closure. This pair of accomplished breast surgeons worked as a team to perform Stephanie’s own revision surgery.
Metro Surgical Associates, Atlanta
ABOUT
Metro Surgical Associates, Atlanta
ABOUT
Drs. Robertson and Phillips-Reed have been tireless advocates for their patients in the Atlanta area for many, many years. They’ve won many awards and given back to their community in so many ways. Dr. Phillips-Reed is one of the top breast cancer surgeons in the U.S. and is a clinical professor of surgery at Morehouse School of Medicine. In 1989, Dr. Phillips-Reed founded Sisters By Choice, a non-profit organization that provides a variety of services to low income and minority communities throughout the metro Atlanta area. She also facilitated the formation of The Greater Atlanta Breast Cancer Task Force, which brings awareness about and works to eliminate breast cancer disparities between black and white women in Atlanta.
Flat Closure is “Reconstructing the Chest Wall”
The Drs. really hit on something that struck me in this discussion – and it was almost an offhand comment, I believe by Dr. Phillips-Reed. She said that flat closure is “reconstructing the chest wall.”
This is such a critical point. Flat closure isn’t just removal of breast tissue – it’s the contouring of the area and producing a smooth scar that lies flat against the patient’s chest. It’s the reconstruction of a normal anatomic contour – the chest wall.
It’s creating a surgical result that the patient can live with.
Thank you, Drs. Robertson and Phillips-Reed, for being a voice for women!
And thank you Stephanie for creating this podcast.
Learn more:
Original version published on NPOAS’ Facebook page on September 18, 2019