Women’s Experiences With Flap Failure After Autologous Breast Reconstruction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clinical experience suggests that flap failure after autologous breast reconstruction can be a devastating experience for women. Previous research has examined women's experiences with autologous breast reconstruction with and without complications, and patients' experiences with suboptimal outcomes from other medical procedures. The authors aimed to examine the psychosocial experience of flap failure from the patient's perspective. Seven women who had experienced unilateral flap failure after deep inferior epigastric perforator flap surgery in the past 12 years completed semistructured interviews about their breast cancer treatments, their experiences with flap failure, the impact of flap failure on their lives, and the coping strategies they used. Interpretive phenomenological analysis, a type of qualitative analysis that provides an in-depth account of participant's experiences and their meanings, was used to analyze the interview data. From these data, patient-derived recommendations were developed for surgeons caring for women who have experienced flap failure. Three main themes (6 subthemes) emerged: coming to terms with flap failure (coping with emotions, body dissatisfaction); making meaning of flap failure experience (questioning, relationship with surgeon); and care providers acknowledging the emotional experience of flap failure (experience of being treated "mechanically," suggestions for improvement). In conclusion, flap failure in breast reconstruction is an emotionally difficult experience for women. Although there are similarities to other populations of patients experiencing suboptimal outcomes from medical procedures, there are also unique aspects of the flap failure experience. A better understanding of women's experiences with flap failure will assist in providing more appropriate supports.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".