The tip of the ice boob... thermal bra designed to help reconstructed breasts stay warm!

... this is so me, I have to permanently wear a bra just to keep warm and now I know why. 

Having won an innovation award myself, i'm so pleased to share this simple innovative idea, the thermal bra!

It’s an unfortunate truth—women who have had a mastectomy and then undergone reconstruction often deal with cold breasts. After reconstruction, a woman will have only a thin layer of skin and muscle between the implant and the outside environment, making it difficult for her body to maintain 98.6°F unless she’s in the tropics. Without a layer of fatty breast tissue, implants quickly lose heat, and it’s difficult to get warm again.

Jodie Faber was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, and she underwent a double mastectomy. A couple of years later, Jodie noticed her breasts were freezing. But she only realised this once she touched them.

“They were very, very cold, and my whole core was cold. When you have a mastectomy, your tissue is removed, and your ability to generate heat is removed because the blood supply is gone. Your nerve endings are gone”, she explained.

Jodie told this to her plastic surgeon, who advised her to put hand warmers in her bra. This turned out to be a bad idea as her breasts were getting burned, and Jodie couldn’t feel it. But at the time, the only solution for cold breasts was to use hand warmers or battery-powered warming bras, which lead to problems and can take away from a sense of normalcy.

She did some online research and realised other women like her had also been burned by hand warmers. After spending some time online, Jodie read about Spectrum Health Innovation, a program that encourages employees to come up with ideas and solutions to benefit their patients and the community as a whole.

Talking to her daughter, Jodie had the idea of a bra that would keep the cold out. With the help of Students from Central Michigan University, this idea was brought to reality: a specially-designed bra to help keep women's breasts warm following double mastectomies and reconstructive surgery. WELL DONE JODIE... I look forward to buying one and even stocking them on the Bold Beanies website. 

I found Jodie's story here:

https://patient-innovation.com/post/1898