Stephen Montoya
Celebrity chef, social media influencer, and podcast host Tiffany Collins Blackmon has been the epitome of health and fitness for many years. The TCU alum taught various types of exercise routines as a personal trainer three times a week while also maintaining a career in the culinary field as a chef. It's why she was so alarmed when she began to experience concerning health issues after undergoing silicone breast augmentation in 2011.
Long before she underwent surgery, Blackmon donned a chef's apron, having attended Johnson & Wales University in South Carolina to study culinary arts. To date, this social media influencer has authored three cookbooks, and is the host of the “My So-Called Fabulous” podcast, a medium she uses as a platform to discuss everything from food, and style, to her year’s long health battle. She is no stranger to bringing up the subject of Breast Implant Illness (BII), an issue, she’s had first-hand experience with.
“I made the decision in 2011 to have augmentation for the wrong reasons,” she says. “I was competing in fitness competitions and it seemed like the thing to do.”
Always one to keep up with trends, Blackmon says she was all for the procedure, in essence to give her an edge in the highly competitive fitness world. However, after she had the procedure done, she says, she immediately didn’t like her implants.
“They were too large … they were larger than I had anticipated, and one of them encapsulated,” she says. “I had to go back into surgery, and I remember telling the surgeon, ‘I don't want these, I really have changed my mind.’”
The surgeon told Blackmon that if she had the implants removed, she would never look the same again. So, to help her try and resolve this procedural buyer’s remorse, Blackmon, along with her surgeon, both agreed to keep the implants only in a smaller size. But the surgery didn’t fare well for Blackmon, who started having medical problems almost immediately after the operation.
“I was the epitome of shape competing in fitness, always eating healthy, and making good lifestyle choices. There was no reason I should be experiencing back pain, GI (gastrointestinal) issues … just pain in general,” she says.
The pain continued to get worse, she says, eventually moving to her legs and then joints. Her health started deteriorating so badly, she got to the point where she started seeking help from medical professionals to find out what the cause was.
“I was a professional chef, so I was traveling on the road doing cooking shows and traveling across the nation in a lot of pain,” Tiffany says.
Experiencing chronic pain while only in her forties, Blackmon says she took a lot of medications to help her get through the day, for years. That was until, she began to experience real GI issues four years ago.
“So, 2020 was the year that our world was a mess, and I went, and I found out I had the ANA marker for autoimmune,” she says.
According to the National Institute of Health, antinuclear antibodies are markers for a number of autoimmune diseases, the most notable of which is systemic lupus erythematosus. For Blackmon, her first autoimmune was psoriasis, which she thought was caused by stress from COVID-19.
“Being at home, not working, whatever the case may be, life, maybe that's it, because stress is a factor of autoimmune for sure,” Blackmon says.
To combat this symptom, Blackmon would take a biologic that would in turn give her a really bad bout of COVID. Her doctor’s advice; stay away from public spaces.
“I'm like, I have a podcast. I'm in social media, I work. It's kind of hard just to stay secluded,” she says.
Stephen Montoya
After stopping the biologics, Blackmon switched to topicals to no avail. While she was trying to get her skin issues under control, Blackmon says she also noticed she was losing a lot of weight. With no other options in mind, she had a colonoscopy and endoscopy performed to see is she could find the root problem to what was causing all of her symptoms.
Her results were inconclusive, but doctors began speculating that she had Crohn’s disease. In the end she was diagnosed with collagenous colitis an autoimmune version of colitis. To try and help defeat this issue, doctor’s put Blackmon on a steroid medication for three months to get her symptoms under control.
During this entire ordeal, Blackmon says she had a podcast guest tell her she had similar symptoms before she underwent an explant surgery to have her implants removed.
“Honestly, I think I had heard a couple of celebrities had, had it, but I didn't think much about it because we're not talking about it at all,” Blackmon says.
Thinking there might be hope in this newfound info, Blackmon began digging into anything and everything she could find in relation to explant procedures, even going as far as reaching out to her guest’s surgeon. Unfortunately, since Blackmon was taking a steroid, she couldn’t undergo any explant procedure for at least 60 days at that time, which left her feeling defeated.
“I was devastated,” she said. “I was ready to get this done. I had made up my mind, this was the fix. And so, it didn't work out. And a friend of mine that works with us, she sent me a podcast and she said, ‘I think you need to listen to this.’”
What Blackmon would hear would be the voice if Dr. Robert Whitfield, a plastic surgeon and “breast implant illness expert” who’s practice was closer than she expected.
“After listening to the podcast, I felt heard. I was in tears and determined that I would travel across the globe to find him,” she says. “To my surprise, he was based in Austin, Texas. I was in his office within a month and preparing for surgery. This decision saved my life.”
Blackmon may have gotten in to see Whitfield quickly, but his instructions weren’t exactly music to her ears. To prepare for a successful explant surgical procedure, Whitfield told Blackmon she needed to rid her body of all of the toxins she had built up over the years taking different medications to help her get better.
“Usually, my clients with BII find me after exhausting all other medical avenues and going through exhaustive medical testing,” Whitfield says. “There’s no diagnostic test to confirm a BII diagnosis, plastic surgeons may need to order tests and review medical records to rule out other diseases or conditions that might be causing the symptoms.”
These tests include a patient’s toxin burden, gut microbiome balance, food sensitivities, hormone balance, and metabolomics. Basically, “the SHARP method,” Whitfield verified.
After preparing her body over several months, Blackmon underwent her explant surgery in November of 2023. The night before her explant surgery, she went on Instagram and announced why she was having the surgery to her followers. Before she knew it, an outpouring of women who had similar experiences called her and messaged her about what to expect.
“I felt like starting a conversation about BII and how it was affecting me,” she says. “Turns out, I’m not alone.”
After her explant operation was complete, Blackmon says she felt better almost immediately. Another huge benefit in having this procedure done was a lifesaving one. After Whitfield removed the capsules, he sent them to pathology for testing. The results — there were cancer cells detected in Blackmon’s right breast.
“So, here we go, full steam ahead; just panic. And you never want to see a carcinoma on a lab report … you just don't,” she says.
The irony in this, is Blackmon had a mammogram in August, just three months before her surgery and nothing was detected.
“It was hiding behind my implant. So, no one's fault, but it was there. I went to the MRI and they called me right after, and the doctor of radiology called me, and he got it when he took that capsule out. It's no longer there,” she says excitedly.
Stephen Montoya
Whitfield says there are thousands of women that are sick with similar symptoms and don’t realize it could be caused by a breast augmentation surgery.
One of his professional warnings is if you already have an autoimmune deficiency or GI issues, it would be wise not to get this specific surgery, because your body will constantly fight against it, like it did for years in Blackmon’s case.
"While there are standard signs and symptoms of discomfort, such as pain or tightness, it's important to note that most individuals exhibit signs and symptoms of chronic inflammation," he says.
When asked how long it might take to recuperate from this type of procedure, Whitfield says, "Recovery periods depend to a large degree on the testing results, the quality of food and fluid intake, the quality of air, and the quantity and quality of sleep."
Now fully on the mend, Blackmon says she's in a better place mentally and physically. But that doesn’t mean she’s out of the woods yet. She’s still healing internally from years of trial-and-error medications. What gives her strength is knowing there might be a way to reduce the pain women who have undergone this surgery might be feeling right away or even years down the line.
“I am just so blessed to have found out this information, and I really attribute a lot of this to the guest on my podcast,” Blackmon says. "If I wouldn't have heard that, if we don't talk about it, if I don't talk to you about it, no one's going to know. There aren’t many resources for this condition and that’s something I intend to help change.”
