Now

I’m living in Sheffield with my wife. I like it here.

To make a living I’m a full-stack developer and jack-of-all-nerds for Tissue & Cell Technologies, an adipose human tissue bank here in Sheffield. We store fat tissue for later use in breast reconstruction, usually if you’ve had to have a mastectomy.

It generally goes like this:

1. You need a breast reconstruction, and your surgeon recommends using fat (via liposuction) from your stomach or thigh to rebuild your breast. There’s often some fat left over that they don’t want to use on the day.
2. Instead of binning it they send it to us at Tissue & Cell Technologies, who process the tissue and cryogenically freeze it.
3. You recover from surgery a bit and your surgeon wants to continue sculpting your breast.
4. Instead of doing another liposuction, your surgeon calls us up (using the super hi-tech online ordering system made by yours truly ;) ), we thaw just the right amount and send it to the hospital on the day of your surgery. You can have it re-injected in a day without having to spend the night in hospital. As long as we’ve got enough tissue, you can have repeat visits to build back slowly and carefully for better long term results.

It’s a niche thing, but it helps a lot of women going through an already hard time minimise the amount of surgery they need while getting really good results. It also helps the NHS minimise the time they have to spend in operating theatres.