14 DAY TRIAL // Suzanne Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer and had half of her right breast removed 12 years ago. Because she didn't want an implant, a “foreign body,” as she refers to it, she had to look for other methods to make herself feel complete again.
After the surgery, the actress tells Anderson Cooper in an interview that will air in full today, she was left with a DD cup on one breast and a B on the other.
To say that they were uneven is an understatement but, even so, she didn't want an implant put it.
She started looking into Steam cell experiments in the hope that she would find someone who could give her her breast back without putting a foreign body in it.
“At the time when they took my breast I didn't want implants, I didn't want a foreign object in my body, I didn't want to do what they call a tram flap, which is where they cut a woman from side to side, at her hip take a muscle and blood vessel and move it up here, there's no feeling,” she explains in the interview.
A preview of it is below, embedded at the end of the article.
“I heard about a doctor in Japan, at the University of Tokyo, who had successfully regrown the breasts of over 400 Japanese women who had lost their breast to cancer,” the actress adds.
Somers contacted Dr. Kotora Yoshimura and brought him back to the US, where she got him in touch with all the right people, enlisting herself in a clinical trial that she helped get off the ground.
“They took fat from my stomach, whipped out my stem cells, separated them, cleaned them and discarded the weak ones. They took the strong ones put them in a small amount of that fat they took from me, [injected] the concoction into this breast and poof,” the actress explains of the experimental surgery.
“They made it the size of the other one, it has feeling, it's soft, there are no scars. I think it's the most incredible exciting thing to happen in breast cancer in a long time,” Somers enthuses.
It feels good to have both breasts of the same size after so many years, the actress says laughing. In fact, she feels so good that she can hardly keep her clothes on, she jokes.
