Physical wellbeing

So what were the 2 incredibly negligent and pertinent points?

My physical health and my emotional health. He completely ignored both. In this post I am going to discuss the effects of the state of my physical body that he chose to ignore.

I had told him that I had not been eating since June, this was now the beginning of October, and I had lost 14kg. When I say not eating, I was drinking “Ensure” for breakfast and supper, and I would have maybe toast for lunch. The traumatic year, had made me lose my apatite, and I just could not force myself to eat.

Now for any reasonable doctor, the first thing that they would consider (I am only saying this now, as since the operation I discussed all of my weight and eating issues with a dietician and other doctors) is that my body had absolutely no nutrients, proper vitamins and minerals to cope with any healing process and definitely not surgery. When a body is starved of food, the first thing that your body starts to lose is zinc, and this is the mineral that is needed in the healing process. My dietician told me that when really bad anorexic people get admitted into hospital they immediately put them on a zinc drip. My body at the time was bruising all the time, and the bruises just would not heal – well that made complete sense to me when my dietician told me this. Now as a plastic surgeon, he should have known I was actually doing this for cosmetic reasons, how did he think that my scars were going to heal? 10 months down the line, the one scar that he cut in the wrong place, 2 cm too big has still not healed. It looks like a huge smiling face below my areola. (To this day I can’t bring myself to look in the mirror.)

The second more very interesting thing was and still is my body temperature. For the dissolving stitches that they use, the way in which the stitches dissolve is by the heat and temperature of your body. Some of my problems began, and are still here as a result of the fact that my stitches would not dissolve. When I went to my surgeon asking him why they are not dissolving, and why they keep getting rejected by my body, and getting infected under my skin – he in his arrogant manner kept saying he had no idea.

Subsequently I found out why. I landed up in hospital, a few months later, and as they do in hospitals they take your temperature a few times every day. My temperature was consistently 35 degrees – meaning it was way too cold for the stitches too dissolve. I had lost too much weight and I was always freezing cold. Now should he not have known this? Should I not have expected a doctor to have some sort of knowledge about dissolving stitches, sudden loss of weight, malnutrition?

I had gone into his offices just wanting to know if my first operation was still ok, and he sold me the idea of another operation, knowing full well of my circumstances and medical health. I would like to know if this is ethical behaviour?

On top of this, a week before the operation, I did feel a bit uneasy about having the operation and I went in and saw him to voice my concerns over my physical health. He once again said, no everything would be fine, there would be nothing to worry about!

This was the beginning of my new life into this dark tunnel of pain I am now living in.

In my next post I will discuss the emotional effects that he should have taken into consideration.

The Beginning

So how did this all begin? 4 years ago I went for breast augmentation and it was successful. Then last year due to unfortunate circumstances I went through a very traumatic year, and I began to lose a lot of weight, or more accurately, I went through considerable depression and I completely stopped eating.

I then started noticing that I could feel my implants. Now I never realized that if you do have a small amount of breast tissue this is normal (at that stage I had never researched this subject in detail) and I thought that my implants had shifted or something had gone terribly wrong with them. I made an appointment with my plastic surgeon, just so that he could find out what exactly was going on.

The day of my appointment. He examined them and completely put my mind at rest by telling me that it was just the fact that I had lost so much weight, and due to the fact that they were the older implants that were used (3 years?) they had now come out with newer improved implants were one could not feel the ridges, and that he thought it would be really good for me to replace my old ones for the newer implants. He could see that I looked completely drained and stressed out, and this he felt was the exact thing that I needed to “cheer” myself up.

I told him that I had not been eating for months, and would this be ok to still have an operation, and he said yes not a problem, everything would go completely smoothly, and once again mentioned that I need something to pick up my self esteem.

I went home and thought about what he had said. Maybe he was right – he was the doctor, he would obviously always put his patient’s lives and interests first, and he would know best, so perhaps that is what I needed. And I also thought that I did not really want to pick up the weight that I had lost, so perhaps it would be nice to have implants that you could not feel under my now limited breast tissue.

Now for my next post, I wonder if you could guess what 2 incredibly negligent and pertinent points he purposefully chose to ignore, to ensure that he just had another customer – I chose the word customer and not patient, as he does not treat his patients as patients they are customers. It was always about money for him.

In fact because of these 2 negligent points, they made a huge impact on my inability to recover from his botched surgery.

Introduction into The Surgeons Secrets - Liberation!

I think the best way to start my blog, is to give you the sort of topics that I intend on discussing:

• How do you choose your surgeon;
• What are the REAL risks of breast augmentation;
• What are the REAL risks of the lack of medical knowledge that plastic surgeons have – they are actually very limited in broad based medical knowledge!;
• Silicone or saline?
• Safari tours;
• Medical malpractice in developing countries such as South Africa;
• Actual physical health you need to be in before your operation;
• Emotional health you need to be in before your operation;
• Weight and body tissue – do you have enough body tissue to cover your implants?
• Aftercare – is your surgeon available for aftercare? Is he too busy, are you in the same country? Safari tours?
• Finances – if the surgery fails, do you have sufficient finances to cover the costs of ongoing medical treatments – this ladies is a very real issue. Your plastic surgeon is not going to cover the costs for you.

I will also be going through my personal journey, so that you can perhaps benefit from what I have been through and make informed choices.