The Truth About Breast Implants

We wish we could tell you what it is. But this fact alone is unimpeachable: A lot of women with breast implants feel unwell—and they think the implants themselves might be to blame. Michelle Stacey talked to doctors and patients to find out why—and where we go from here.

- Michelle Stacey

CANDYCE KIRBYSON wanted a bit more. At 105 pounds, she had A-cup breasts. So at 32, the Seattle-area mom decided to get implants.

But she got a lot more. A laundry list of ailments, in fact. Hives and muscle weakness. Numbness and tingling in her arms and legs. Insomnia and chronic sinusitis. At various points in Kirbyson’s 14-year slog through doctor’s offices, MRIs, and emergency-room visits, it was suggested (among many other potential diagnoses) that she had “mold toxicity,” sometimes known as “sick-building syndrome.” Kirbyson wondered if it had to do with her new office. “I was on and off antibiotics that would work for a while, and then my hives and inflammation would come back,” she says. “I sometimes felt like I was getting early Alzheimer’s, like my brain wasn’t working. I tried integrative medicine, functional medicine, ENTs. Nobody could figure out what was going on, and doctors said it was all in my head. I felt like I was dying.”

Never once did Kirbyson suspect the implants as the source of her sickness since she didn’t have pain in her breasts and not one doctor had ever raised the possibility. Then late last year, she read an article that led her to a Facebook group that described similar symptoms. “I started crying my eyes out, because everything I was reading was what had happened to me,” she says. Kirbyson consulted a local plastic surgeon who was mentioned in the group and had her implants removed in January.

Slowly, her symptoms are diminishing. “My energy is back, my brain fog is lifting, the tingling and hives are happening less,” she says. “I’m 500 percent sure that my whole system broke after I got implants.”