Bilateral mastectomy - no more screening mammograms!

lekker- I don't have Kaiser but I get letters in the mail saying my mamogram is overdue & it is particularily important for me to have continued mamograms with my history of breast cancer. I went to the imaging center to have a DEXA scan done & the technician in a nice voice told me she could also do my mamogram for me. I told her "i don't get those anymore" & she responded "oh, OK". I still get the letters but I ignore them & sometimes chuckle at them. Apparently in parts of Canada(other women have posted this), mamograms are still done on women with BMXs without reconstruction. They pull any & all the skin they can & compress. Having had a BMX & no recon, I'd refuse!!

Maybe the formal complaint will lead to a change(eventually)

Okay, a different perspective here.  Even if you have a BMX, you still can get breast cancer.  Yes, the risk is low but there is a 1% - 2% chance.  This means that one or two women out of every one hundred women who have a BMX who will get BC again - and this isn't referring to a distant recurrence (i.e., mets, which is a separate risk for those who had invasive cancer) - this is a recurrent or new breast cancer in the breast area. When you think of all the women who have a MX or BMX (probably about 100,000 every year in North America), this means that quite a number of women will end up with a local recurrence. 

So despite having a BMX, it's important that you be diligent and do BSEs and/or screenings. I've been hanging around here for 7 years and I've seen several cases where women thought that they had no risk of BC after a BMX and didn't do their BSEs or screenings, and ended up with a more advanced diagnosis than they would have had it they'd caught it earlier. So maybe you aren't getting mammos anymore, but why not use the reminder to get your mammo as a reminder to do a BSE and get checked?

I'm 7 years past my UMX. Because it was a UMX, I've continued to have screenings for my remaining breast. I get mammos and MRIs every year - the MRIs are because I have extremely dense breast tissue and a history of BC. The MRI is bilateral so it also provides a check of my implant reconstructed breast. Until this year, I'd never had a mammo on my reconstructed breast. But this year when I went in for my annual mammo on my natural breast, the tech offered up that they are now doing mammos on reconstructed breasts and she asked if wanted to have a mammo done on that breast as well. I was pretty surprised and worried that it would hurt but I figured "why not give it a try?" If it hurt, I'd just ask her to stop. It turned out that it didn't hurt at all. And with the results being clear, I left with the comfort of knowing that there is nothing going on against the skin or chest muscle or in the nodes on my mastectomy side. All these years I'd thought that having a mammo on a reconstructed breast was kind of silly but it turned out to be easy and reassuring. I'd glad I did it.  

So maybe those notices aren't so silly or inappropriate after all. But like I said, that's just offering up another perspective on this. 

I have no experience with Kaiser but I've heard nothing but bad things about them! No, you wouldn't likely need to deal with this with another insurance provider. No one has ever sent me a "list" of screenings or tests -- that alone would make me angry, my doctors and I decide what tests I need, not my insurance company!

I don't blame you for being upset about this. My guess is that they have some sort of standardized list and they really can't remove it (like the computer won't let them or something). I can understand why it would be upsetting to you, and I'm sorry they aren't being responsive! 

Kind of reminds me of my post-surgery (BMX) nurses asking me if I was having "breast pain." I get that they wanted to understand where my pain was located, but if I don't have breasts, I can't have breast pain, and it hurt to hear that over & over.