Imagine you have a shirt that has a pocket on the front. Now, imagine that you have to get rid of that pocket because it is damaged or not needed anymore. That's what happens during a mastectomy.
A mastectomy is a surgery where the doctors remove a person's breast that might be damaged or have a cancerous tumor. After the breast is removed, there is an empty space where the breast used to be. The doctors need to close this space to help the person heal and make sure everything stays in place.
Now, the doctors have a few different options to close this space. One option is called flat closure. This means that instead of putting something in the empty space, like an implant or tissue from another part of the body, they simply sew the skin together to make it flat.
It's a bit like when you have a big tear on a piece of paper and you use tape to stick the edges back together. In flat closure, the doctors use special stitches to sew the skin back together over the empty space where the breast used to be. This helps the person heal and eventually the area looks flat, like the rest of their chest.
Flat closure after a mastectomy is a choice some people make because they might not want to have an implant or use tissue from somewhere else in their body. It's important to remember that everyone's choices and preferences are different, and it's up to the person and their doctors to decide what is best for them.