Nipples

I have to tell you, if your doctor sees your breasts and your nipples are unusual in some way, this will almost definitely become a source of conversation later. Even if your complaint has nothing to do with the nipples.

For example, I remember during a surgery when I was a med student, the patient had really inverted nipples. The surgeon made us all look at her nipples and try to figure out why they were like that, and if it might be pathological. I think she was having, like, brain surgery or something.

When I worked in urgent care, I saw a patient with breast pain, who had the most unusual nipples I have ever seen. When I first saw her breast, I thought, "Oh my god, she has a huge tumor coming out of her nipple!" Then I looked at her other breast and it looked identical. Her nipples were like... pedunculated. They looked like huge polyps coming out her areolas. They were so long that the nipples themselves were actually sagging enough to have folded in half. And it was even more significant because her breasts were really small.

When I presented her to the attending, I told her, "She has really strange nipples."

"Are they inverted?" she asked.

"No, it's even weirder than that. You'll see."

The attending was also pretty impressed with the woman's nipples and said she had "never seen anything like that." We had a whole discussion about how on earth the woman managed to breast feed... I would have thought an infant would choke on a nipple like that.

But at least that time we were supposed to be looking at her nipples. And no, we never figured out why she had breast pain.