Chrissy Powers used to focus on all the things that seemed wrong in her life. But after six years, she’s now paying attention to what makes her feel good.
“I’m really thankful for where I am now compared to this time last year,” she said.
In early 2024, this 46-year-old mom from Fredericton spoke to CTV. She had just traveled to Montreal for breast implant removal surgery, also called explant surgery. At that time, Powers was worried she had breast implant illness, or “BII”.
“Since my surgery, some symptoms have definitely gone away,” Powers says. “The main things I’ve noticed are that my hair, which was falling out, is growing back. My headaches have improved. The pain in my joints and muscles is better. I had brain fog and trouble with short-term memory and focusing, and those problems have gotten a lot better too. But it’s hard to say for sure which symptoms were related to the implants and which weren’t.”
Health Canada uses the term “breast implant illness” to describe different symptoms or diseases that people with breast implants have had, no matter what kind of implant they had. Reported symptoms include being tired, joint pain, memory problems, or inflammation. The public health agency says there have been reports of diseases in people with breast implants since the early 1980s, but there’s no test to diagnose BII.
“If I had known about all the different risks from the start, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it,” Powers says. “Or I would have chosen a different type of breast reconstruction, not with implants.”
In 2018, Powers had a double mastectomy. She did this to lower her risk of breast cancer after finding out she had the BRCA 2 gene mutation. This mutation made her chance of getting breast cancer as high as 85 per cent. She then had an immediate reconstruction with silicone implants. She says that’s when the BII symptoms started. She searched online and found that her type of implant was part of a 2019 Health Canada recall. The recall was linked to BIA-ALCL, a rare type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Powers went to Montreal in early 2024 to have her breast implants removed. The surgery and the cost of staying there came to about $20,000 for Powers.
“I would do it again in an instant,” she says. “I hope that New Brunswick Medicare will really think about covering private clinic costs in the future. It would be great if Health Canada and Medicare in general could look into this, because at the end of the day, it’s all about getting people in New Brunswick healthy again.”
New Brunswick’s health department told CTV Atlantic in an email that Medicare only covers the removal of breast implants if the initial insertion was covered by Medicare. If the insertion was for cosmetic reasons and not covered by Medicare, the removal isn’t covered either, unless the patient gets a severe infection, breast cancer, or another life-threatening condition that requires the implants to be removed.
The explant surgery was done by Dr. Stephen Nicolaidis, a plastic surgeon based in Montreal.
“If my patients weren’t all telling me they feel better after the surgery, I wouldn’t keep doing it,” Nicolaidis says. “Out of 1,100 explant surgeries, I can probably count on one hand, or at most two hands, the number of patients who said they didn’t feel any difference. Almost everyone feels better when the implants are removed, whether it’s because of BII or mechanical problems.”
Nicolaidis started focusing on explant surgeries in 2018 and decided to stop doing implant surgeries in 2021.
“I haven’t regretted that decision since,” Nicolaidis says. “I’m the leader in explant surgery. I’m pretty sure I’ve done twice as many explant surgeries as the next plastic surgeon in Canada.”
Health Canada said in a statement to CTV Atlantic that breast implant manufacturers have to include box warnings about the risk of BIA-ALCL, patient decision checklists, and device cards to help track the devices. The statement also said that “this information is given to healthcare professionals, who are responsible for sharing it with their patients during the informed consent process.”
Nicolaidis says there are now “active discussions” in the medical community about the possible risks of implants.
Nicolaidis does between three and four surgeries a day. Each one takes about two hours. He said that 20 to 30 per cent of his patients come from outside Montreal.
“The reason this is a problem is that we didn’t take it seriously enough,” Dr. Nicolaidis says. “Even when I was a resident at McGill, we didn’t talk about the complications. Over the years, we’ve realized that there are problems like BII, cancers caused by some implants, and recalls. So patients are angry because they weren’t told about all these risks in the beginning.”
Health Canada has published a factsheet for people thinking about getting breast implants and a safety review of BII to help them make informed decisions.
“Whether it’s BII or just the normal complications with an implant, patients need to know that there’s easily a 20 to 30 per cent chance they’ll need a revision just because of complications,” Nicolaidis says. He says more research needs to be done, and it shouldn’t be funded by breast implant companies.
“One of the big problems now is that there’s still a lot of conflict of interest,” Nicolaidis says. “You can understand that this is a huge industry, worth billions of dollars. So there’s always this conflict of interest, even in the research that’s being done. Now, with social media, people with BII have come together, complained, and have more of a voice.”
Powers said she wants to be an advocate for BII and the risks of breast implants and other medical devices.
“I’m mainly talking about breast implants because that’s my personal experience, but it’s about medical devices in general,” Powers says. “Often, we’re not fully told about all the side effects or what can happen when we have medical devices in our bodies. It’s only months or years later that we start having problems. Then we go back and forth with our family doctor, trying to figure out what’s wrong, because we’re not going back to our plastic surgeon. If you’re complaining about headaches a year later, or joint muscle pain or blurred vision, you go to your family doctor. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
Health Canada said in a statement, “it will keep watching for the possible risks of BII symptoms and diseases and will take the right action if it finds any changes in the health risks.” The agency has a website where Canadians can sign up to get updates on breast implants.
Powers keeps having follow-up appointments with her family doctor and Nicolaidis. At the same time, she’s sharing her story to teach more people.
“If I’ve learned anything in the last 18 months, it’s to listen to my body. If something doesn’t feel right, I should trust my instincts.”
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