In the News
Reprint provided courtesy of the Winnipeg Free Press
Build a Better Breast
Wendy Smith lost her favourite aunt to breast cancer.
She has never forgotten how the resourceful lady coped with the flat place on her chest after her mastectomy: by sticking a bag of birdseed in her bra.
'You should be able to put one on and forget about it' - Wendy Smith Smith, a certified prosthetist, is a poster presenter at the World Conference on Breast Cancer, which opens today at the Winnipeg Convention Centre.
While many of the poster boards will document clinical research findings, Smith's, presented in cartoon form, is entitled My Quest to Build a Better Breast.
"It's the story of my journey... and what I've learned," says the owner of Winnipeg's Lifeart Prosthetics who also has a booth in the conference's exhibit hall.
Smith, 47, worked at the Health Sciences Centre for 15 years making prosthetic arms and legs.
In 1995 she founded Lifeart, a one-woman business specializing in remarkably lifelike, painstakingly crafted prosthetic fingers, hands, noses, ears and buttocks.
About six years ago, she started trying to build a better breast for women who have undergone full or partial mastectomy. Mass-produced synthetic breasts may function better than birdseed, she says, but many cancer survivors find them heavy, hot and prone to shifting.
If a woman wearing a prosthesis is self-conscious and uncomfortable, her posture can become hunched. And if a commercial prosthesis made of silicone gel gets punctured, it leaks and can't be repaired. Smith knows one woman whose cats' claws destroyed her gel breast.
Custom-designed Lifeart silicone breasts weigh only about half as much as the lightest available mass-produced type, Smith says. They are not made of gel so they can't leak.
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