Lifeline

You don’t like your nose? Cut it off, we´ll stick on a new one. Don’t like your lips? We´ll fill them up! When you´re thinking about plastic surgery, most of the time you think about fixing faces. And most of the time this is what happens. But sometimes, it goes wrong. For example, when people choose to go to a “doctor” who will do the surgery for lesser money, or who´ll even pretend to be a doctor. Then you’ll end up with a nose that’s dying slowly for example. A disaster! 

It all started with Sir Harold Delf Gillies. Gillies was born in New Zealand. He studied medicine at Cambridge University. Following the outbreak of world war 1 he joined the Royal Army Medical corps. One thing led to the other and he became enthusiastic about repairing people’s faces. The Queen’s Hospital opened in June 1917 where Gillis developed many techniques of plastic surgery; more than 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 men (mostly soldiers).  

In time, the techniques improved, or that’s what we thought. More and more warnings came up, regarding the danger of plastic surgery. The last couple of years the Brazilian butt lift (BBL) is lightly said, not recommended. The rate of mortality is estimated to be as high as 1:3000. BBL is performed by removing fat from areas like the stomach and injecting it into the buttocks. The risk is a fat embolism, this is when fat comes into the bloodstream and blocks a blood vessel. It can even reach the lungs and block oxygen that is trying to enter the blood, in the brain it can cause a stroke.  

Another disaster came up in China in 2013. A man sued his wife because she married him under false pretences. How he found out? Their children were hideous! At first he thought that she had an affair, because these kids couldn’t be his children. But after a DNA test, it became clear that he was really the father. Then the mother confessed that she has had plastic surgery before she met her husband. He sued her for 120.000 dollars and won! The judge agreed with his statement.  

The most dangerous thing about plastic surgery, I think, are the “doctors” who never really studied to be a surgeon. A news article from 2009 tells about a man from Den Haag, better known as the ‘horror doctor’. He was actually a gynaecologist but offered to do plastic surgery as well. He caused a lot of woman severe injuries and ugly scars. He didn’t even use the right equipment, he used a sort of sealant you can buy at a construction market. The ‘horror doctor’ had to spend two years in jail and can never practice medicine again.  

Now I hear you thinking that there are a lot of beautiful things about plastic surgery as well. For example when someone wants to switch gender or is born with a harelip or has some other bodily default that causes emotional harm. But I think plastic surgery has a lot of dangers as well and that the risks are too high if you just want a nicer nose or a bigger butt. If you want a bigger butt, go to the gym you lazy, before it turns out to be a disaster!