Inspiring Change

Inspiring Change

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If you’ve lost one or both breasts to a mastectomy, your options for managing the after-effects are limited. Reconstructive surgery is expensive, and women who cannot afford it or are not offered it are left with uneven breasts or visibly absent ones. This can devastate their sense of femininity, and complicate something as simple as getting dressed. Another option is to wear a mastectomy bra or an external prosthesis, but even this can be expensive.

Engineering technologist and tech entrepreneur Nneile Nkholise is determined to change that, and provide breast cancer survivors with dignity, regardless of their income bracket. While Nneile was a Masters student working on 3D-printing prosthetic noses and ears for people with facial deformities, she realised that the same technology could be used to help women who had lost their breasts to cancer. She started making prosthetic breasts that can be worn inside a bra to create the right shape and restore symmetry if one breast has been removed. ‘I had seen how so many women’s lives were affected by breast cancer – and the number of women who undergo mastectomy is at an all-time high,’ she says.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. The Cancer Association of South Africa reports that one in 26 South African women will be affected by breast cancer in her lifetime. However, specialist breast surgeon Professor Justus Apffelstaedt estimates that diagnoses may be underreported by as much as 30%, and suspects that the real number is closer to the one in eight reported in Britain, the USA and Australia. The vast majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer will have mastectomies – in the public healthcare system it’s 75%. Justus explains that this is because of late detection; the cancer is already advanced by the time it is diagnosed and it’s too late for less invasive treatments.