After a quarter century with her original saline implants, one longtime Mount Pleasant resident finally sat down with board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. James Craigie at East Cooper Plastic Surgery to ask the question she had been putting off for years.
The business card had been sitting on Margaret's kitchen counter since March. She could not remember exactly when someone had handed it to her, only that it had drifted from her purse to the mail pile to the spot beside the fruit bowl, where it now lived under a grocery list and a half-finished crossword. East Cooper Plastic Surgery, it read, with a phone number she had dialed halfway through more times than she could count before setting the phone back down.
The Card on the Counter
It was not that anything felt wrong, not exactly. Her implants were the same saline implants she had chosen twenty-five years earlier, back when the decision had felt almost casual. They had never rippled, never looked uneven, never given her a single reason to think about them beyond the occasional glance in the mirror. But she had turned sixty that spring, and a comment from her mammogram technician, something offhand about how long she had had 'these,' had lodged itself in her mind and would not leave. Twenty-five years. She began to wonder, quietly and then not so quietly, how long breast implants were actually supposed to last, and whether hers were living on borrowed time.
Twenty-Five Years, One Question
She started the way most people do, with a search bar at midnight. The answers were not identical from site to site, but they circled the same idea. According to the FDA, breast implants are not considered lifetime devices, and the longer someone has them, the greater the chance that complications will eventually develop. The agency's guidance on implant types confirmed something else Margaret had not fully appreciated: saline implants are still used today, including in revision surgeries like the one she was starting to consider, and imaging such as an MRI remains the most reliable way to check on an implant that has been in place a long time.
None of it was alarming exactly. But it was enough to turn 'someday' into 'soon.'
Finding the Right Surgeon
In her search for a breast revision surgeon in Mount Pleasant, SC, Margaret kept circling back to the same name. Dr. Craigie's reputation had reached her long before she ever sat in his waiting room, largely through the women in her book club who had gone to him for breast reconstruction after cancer treatment. She was not facing anything like what they had been through, and she said so out loud in her first consultation, almost apologetically. It did not matter to him. He gave her the same unhurried attention he was known for giving his reconstruction patients, walking her through what twenty-five years actually does to an implant and what her options looked like now.
'He didn't rush through my questions,' she would say later. 'He answered every single one, and by the time I left that first visit, I already had a real answer instead of a guess I'd been carrying around for years.'
The Consultation That Changed Her Mind
The conversation covered more ground than Margaret expected. Dr. Craigie explained the difference between the two main breast implant types, saline and silicone, and why either one still has a place in a replacement decision depending on a patient's anatomy and goals. He also walked her through what breast implant replacement surgery actually involves: removing the old implant, examining the surrounding tissue, and placing a new one, sometimes paired with a lift if skin elasticity has changed over the decades. For Margaret, staying with saline implant replacement made the most sense, and hearing the reasoning laid out plainly, rather than just handed to her as a recommendation, was what finally settled her mind.
The Day of Surgery
The morning of her breast implant replacement surgery arrived faster than she expected once the decision was made. She remembers very little about the procedure itself, which she counts as a good thing. What she remembers is waking up in recovery to a nurse checking on her, and then Dr. Craigie stopping by before she went home to walk through exactly what he had found and done, in plain language, no rushing.
Five Days In
By the fifth day after surgery, Margaret was surprised by how ordinary her recovery felt. She was healing well, moving through her days with more ease than she had braced for, and the follow-up calls from the office kept catching her off guard in a good way, since she had not expected anyone to check in that closely.
'Five days out, and I already feel more like myself, just lighter,' she told a friend on the phone that week. 'I keep waiting for it to feel like a bigger deal than it does.'
What Twenty-Five Years Taught Her
Looking back now, Margaret says the hardest part was never the surgery itself. It was the years of wondering, the quiet math she kept doing in her head every time she saw a headline about implant safety or heard a friend mention hers were being replaced. Having an actual answer, rather than a decades-old assumption, changed how she thinks about the whole subject.
'Twenty-five years is a long time to trust something on faith,' she says now. 'I finally have real information instead.'
That business card does not sit on the counter anymore. In its place is a small appointment reminder card for her one-year follow-up, tucked into the same spot by the fruit bowl, no longer something she is avoiding.
If you have been carrying your own version of Margaret's question, whether your implants are five years old or twenty-five, East Cooper Plastic Surgery in Mount Pleasant offers the kind of straightforward, unhurried consultation that turned Margaret's uncertainty into a plan. Learn more about breast enhancement and implant replacement options, or read our related guide on what to expect from breast implant removal if you are still exploring your choices. When you are ready to talk it through with a board-certified plastic surgeon, schedule a surgical consultation with our Mount Pleasant team.
