2020 PPP magazine

2020 Paint the Paper Pink Lincoln Daily News October 2020 Page 45 After your breast is numbed, a mammogram or ultrasound is used to guide a thin hollow needle to the abnormal area. Once the tip of the needle is in the right spot, a thin wire is put in through the center of the needle. A small hook at the end of the wire keeps it in place. The needle is then taken out. The surgeon uses the wire as a guide to find the part of the breast to be removed. The surgery done as part of the wire localization may be enough to count as breast-conserving surgery if all of the cancer is taken out and the margins are negative. If cancer cells are found at the edge of the removed tissue (also called a positive or close margin), more surgery may be needed. It should be noted that a wire- localization procedure is sometimes used to perform a surgical biopsy of a suspicious area in the breast to find out if it is cancer or not. There are other ways a surgeon can be guided to the tumor, but these techniques are newer and not used in every facility. [The American Cancer Society medical and editorial content team] Our team is made up of doctors and oncology certified nurses with deep knowledge of cancer care as well as journalists, editors, and translators with extensive experience in medical writing.