Plastic Surgery Gone Wrong

Plastic is not always fantastic!  That doesn’t stop celebrities from crossing their fingers and entering those operating rooms, though.  That promise of looking just a little more glamorous or just a little bit younger is hard to deny.  With surgeries becoming more and more common, it is now more acceptable than ever for recipients to admit to going under the knife, for better or for worse, happy with the results or not.

Joan Rivers recently confessed to Anderson Cooper that she’s had 739 procedures.  It’s hard to believe that number could actually be accurate, but the sentiment is the same regardless – she’s had work done, and isn’t going to deny it:

Joan Rivers

Sharon Stone admitted having work done on her mouth, unhappily so: “What the hell?” and “(I looked) like a trout.”  The botched procedure made her swear off plastic surgery.

Heidi Montag admits to having ten procedures on one date, including: a brow lift, nose job revision, boob job revision, botox, lipo on stomach and thighs, cheek and lip injections, ear pinning, chin reduction, neck lipo and butt augmentation.

Slyvester Stalone has had work done to correct facial asymmetry due to forceps being used at birth.

It’s a matter of tossing the dice, trusting a doctor (or someone who claims to be a doctor) to be able to mold you into something ‘better’.  Admitting it isn’t the hard part anymore.  The difficult thing to do is end up looking human when all is said and done!

Plastic surgery disasters seem in endless supply anymore, from disfigured faces to inflated back ends from liposuction gone wrong. Hard to believe, considering the noble beginnings. The British soldier Walter Yeo was recorded as being the first modern skin graft recipient in just 1917.  The first American plastic surgeon was John Peter Mettauer, who, in 1827, performed the first cleft palate operation with instruments that he designed himself. In 1845, Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach wrote a comprehensive text on rhinoplasty and introduced the concept of reoperation to improve the cosmetic appearance of the reconstructed nose.

However, even the ancient Romans performed simple procedures, such as those used to repair damaged earlobes, around 1 BC.  Their Greek predecessors, including one Aulus Cornelius Celsus, left some fairly detailed accounts of simple facial surgeries.

It wasn’t until recently, however, with advances in medicine that rendered any kind of surgery safer and capable of yielding consistent results, that things really got out of control.

You have got to look at this video of Dr. Phil interviewing a Plastic Surgeon who is helping victims of botched plastic surgery procedures.  You can see these people mostly just had injections, which seem like one of the least invasive procedures.

While we all want to look and feel our best, there are some risks just not worth taking. ABC News recently put together a list of procedures that are the least likely to offer results that justify the risks:

• Mesotherapy and Lipodissolve
• Cosmetic Foot Surgery
• Permanent Filler Injections
• Injection for Breast Augmentation
• Cosmetic Leg Lengthening Surgery
• Buttock Implants
• Tattooed Makeup
• Extreme Facial Procedures
• Combination Mastopexy/Breast Implant
• And of course:  Any Procedure by Untrained Hands!!

Here is a video that has a slew of before and after pictures of Jocelyn Wildenstein, who is horrifyingly addicted to plastic surgery.  To see how beautiful she was before going under the knife is almost upsetting.

What will $4 million dollars and a love of cats get you?  It got Jocelyn Wildenstein a huge amount of surgeries and an unrecognizable face.

Married to a wealthy socialite with a love of big cats, she found herself being cheated on.  To win back her hubby she began a transformation into Cat Lady:

Cat Lady

Her husband was quoted as saying:  “She seems to think that you fix a face the same way you fix a house”.  Apparently, he was not impressed.

Another common (and some say safe) form of plastic surgery is liposuction. This procedure has become so common that the side-effects aren’t often considered. Unfortunately, a botched liposuction procedure can be as traumatic as any other surgical mishap, leaving a patient traumatized and worse off than before. To make matters worse, it’s reported that many patients with the unfavorable results are ashamed to come forward.

Compounding the risks involved are other procedures that doctors will often use in tandem with the liposuction, such as laser treatment.  This makes the whole procedure more difficult and harder to recover from.

To do liposuction well requires:

• knowledge to determine what constitutes an attractive human contour
• the ability and knowledge to decide when someone is a good candidate or not
• be able to evaluate whether a patient’s skin will allow for a good outcome
• a sense of what is too much energy, too much suction and too much compression during recovery to prevent permanent damage

In short, it requires a SKILLED doctor.  Do your research before having your body maimed!

Sometimes having too much money is a bad thing, as you can see in the video.  Millions of dollars spent on injections, surgeries and reconstructions… only to look completely disfigured.

Sometimes plastic surgery is for people who actually need it – not just people trying to disfigure themselves back into youth.  Walter Yeo was a Navy man who suffered severe facial injuries while guarding the guns on a battleship, including the loss of his upper and lower eyelids.

After being transferred from one hospital to another, he was treated by Sir Harold Gillies, the first man to transfer skin from undamaged areas on the body.  Yeo was thought to be the first recipient of this procedure, which left with with a ‘mask’ of skin across his face, a form of skin transplantation called a ‘tubed pedicle’ flap.

Plastic Surgery Gone Right?

Amazing thing?  He was then declared fit for active duty again, AFTER the procedure, until he was finally recommended for medical discharge two years later.

Thinking about doing it yourself?  Don’t!

Apparently, after having multiple surgeries done, this Korean woman couldn’t find doctors willing to operate anymore.  Somehow she managed to talk a doctor who was not only willing to inject her with silicone, but who supplied her with a do-it-yourself face injection kit where she could inject herself at home.  Unfortunately, she ran out of silicone and decided to try using COOKING OIL.  Yes, you read that right.

Naturally, things didn’t go so well.

Her face and neck swelled to gigantic proportions.  She was teased by neighborhood children and attracted media attention until she was able to collect enough money in the form of donations to seek medical help.  During the first procedure surgeons removed 60g of foreign substance from Hang’s face and 200g from her neck. They were eventually able to reduce her face to its natural size, though she was left disfigured and scarred.

All said and done, she was able to see the err in her ways and simply wishes to have her original, untouched face back.