Archive News
Healing hands that rebuild lives and give new hope
Date Published: {J}
it seems a bit crass to talk about boob jobs with a plastic surgeon who specialises in cancer and trauma patients but Deirdre Jones has heard it all before. After all, she trained and worked in New York where some plastic surgery procedures are almost as routine as going to the dentist.
As one of her specialities, breast reconstruction is likely to feature highly on her surgical list at University Hospital Galway, Portiuncla and Roscommon Hospitals, to which she was appointed in July.
So when asked if many women opt to go up or down a few sizes after a mastectomy she reveals that breast reduction is one of the most common requests in a breast reconstruction.
“Certainly people often upsize or downsize. I think it’s perfectly valid.
“There are limited instances, because of the size or position of the tumour, where you can give somebody more aesthetically pleasing breasts, particularly in the case of pendulous breasts.
“I think there is a real focus now to get nice cosmetic results,” she adds. “At first the focus was on creating a breast mound to fill out a bra. The gold standard now is to look good naked – that’s the real test.
“People vary highly in how they feel about their breasts. Some people want only a prosthesis in their bra and have had enough of hospitals. Some elderly women can surprise you and want the best reconstruction out there.
“The oncological consideration i
s key. It is ideal if you can get a construction that you can actually like, if you can achieve a breast that you like more than the original.”
In Galway, breast surgeons perform all the mastectomies as well as most of the reconstructions.
In the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York where Deirdre did a microsurgery fellowship, plastic surgeons do all the reconstructions, of which 80% are breast, 10% are in the head and neck, and the rest around the rest of the body.
“When the breast and plastic surgeon work closely together they can agree where the scar will be. Very often you can have an immediate reconstruction on the same day,” she explains.
“In bigger women you have extra abdominal tissue and they may have bigger breasts so if you’re using an abdominal flap you’re not sacrificing any muscles.
“You’re taking the skin and fat and using it to create a breast, so no implant is needed. Six months later you reconstruct a nipple. The other side may or may not need symmetrisation [to make both look the same].”
But Deirdre is keen to point out that not all her work is focused on the mammary glands.
Almost every day surgery is scheduled on what is called nail bed injuries caused by slamming doors, mainly on kids (she recommends parents get the Ikea door stoppers) and flexor tendon injuries caused by knives, lawnmowers and balers.
The volume is hardly surprising when you hear that up to a quarter of patients presenting to the emergency department have upper limb injuries.
She does a lot of work on burn injuries as well as on patients with skin cancer. The incidence of melanoma increased by 92% in the ten years to 2008, according to figures released by the Irish Cancer Society so excising lesions and reconstructing the skin is a routine procedure.
Sometimes she deals with people who have tattoos and piercings that they regret and want removed, but Deirdre explains that the resources and space are frequently not available to carry out these procedures.
“My interest is in reconstruction in trauma and cancer,” she says. “There’s minimal cosmetic practice here [in Galway] it would need to be a fairly extreme case to do a cosmetic procedure.”
Plastic surgery was a speciality that excited her from her earliest days as a medical student at UHG.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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