ROYAL OAK, Mich. – Kimberly Poulette is not afraid to travel for the best medical care available. She lives in the small town of Thayer, Missouri, making some travel unavoidable.
“I know I’m going to have to travel because where we live is very rural, very small, so I have to go somewhere, and my husband is fortunate to have good insurance with his job,” said Poulette.
Poulette was just 40 years old when she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. She had just decided to find a new doctor.
“At my very first appointment with my new doctor, she said, she walked in and said, ‘Nice to meet you, and I noticed you turned 40 in March. You need a mammogram,’” remembered Poulette.
The diagnosis was a total shock.
“I didn’t feel like I had any symptoms at all, and so, no family history of breast cancer, no anything, wasn’t anywhere on my radar,” said Poulette.
Adding to her worry, Poulette and her husband Garrett had two children and were in the process of adopting a third.
“I got diagnosed in August, and we adopted him that October, and then he turned two in December,” said Poulette. “Obviously, you worry, like as a mom, you’re there to take care of your kiddos, you know, and you want to be there to do that. You want to be able to do that fully.”
Poulette did her chemotherapy four hours away in St. Louis, then underwent a modified radical mastectomy in Boston and came back to St. Louis for radiation.
After intense treatments, Poulette was cancer-free, but she was still battling side effects.
“I had a lot of radiation and a lot of kind of issues with my shoulder and chronic pain there from that skin being very tight,” said Poulette. “And that was one of the primary motivations, was, can they release that?”
Poulette had not opted for breast reconstruction after her mastectomy, but she learned a surgery called a DIEP flap procedure could reconstruct her breast using her own tissue and potentially ease her shoulder pain.
Her research led her to Dr. Jesse Selber at Corewell Health Beaumont University Hospital, who had pioneered a technique operating robotically.
“I started doing that in 2019; I developed the procedure, wrote it up, and have been using it pretty much since,” said Selber.
Selber explained using a robot to assist in the procedure dramatically reduces the risk of abdominal bulges when fat tissue is removed to rebuild the breast.
“First of all, there are no bulges,” said Selber. “So zero bulges in the however 150 cases that have been reported. And now, we really don’t notice much post-operative pain. We can discharge patients earlier and they recover better.”
That was important to Poulette.
“I was really concerned with the downtime, the recovery time,” said Poulette. “And I thought, you know, if this can cut the recovery time in half and minimize the pain, where I can still manage and do what I need to do to take care of my family, then I wanted to explore that.”
Poulette was a perfect candidate and, in February, traveled to Michigan for the surgery.
“People do wonder, like, ‘How did you end up out here, and how did you find this?’ And I’m like, ‘You know, really, never underestimate Google,’” laughed Poulette. “We did question a little bit: should we have looked harder for a surgeon in Miami? If I known it was gonna be in February.”
But it was all worth it.
“I recovered and healed so quickly, more so than I ever could have imagined that I would,” said Poulette. “It’s just made such a huge impact on how I feel every day.”
Because her motivation to get the surgery wasn’t cosmetic, Poulette said she didn’t anticipate how much the results would affect her.
“I can walk into a room now, and nobody knows that I had cancer, have ever had cancer, and that was something that you carry without really realizing, that every time I walked into a space, I was keenly aware that people looked at me differently,” said Poulette. “I feel great, and it wasn’t something that I thought would mean that much to me in terms of appearance.”
Dr. Selber sees great potential in using robotics to improve patient outcomes. Corewell Health Beaumont University Hospital recently reached the significant milestone of 25,000 lifetime robotic procedures.
“When you can do something better by adding a new tool, it’s exciting to develop that process,” said Selber. “Talk about it. Spread that, but really, ultimately, this is about it being better for patients. Seeing somebody like Kimberly, who you know, pretty much popped out of bed the next day and went off to the races. A lot of people don’t have that experience with this operation.”
For Poulette and her family, it’s brought a new appreciation.
“My first grandbaby was born right before I came out to have this surgery. It’s not lost on me that these are the moments that I would have missed. Those are the moments that you don’t want to take those things for granted,” said Poulette. “You can learn from anything in life, good and bad experiences. I’ve always tried to teach my kids that that you learn from everything, if you will, if you’re open and you allow yourself to, and the appreciation and the gratitude that I have gained from walking through this experience. You know, it keeps everything in perspective, that every day is a gift.”