When it comes to cosmetic surgery,
us Brits just can't get enough.
Last year we spent £2.3 billion
in a bid to be more beautiful.
It's about improvement, refinement, retouching.
But without 200,000 operations every year,
it's no wonder that corrective surgery for botched-up bodies
is also on the rise.
There is effectively no way of avoiding
ever having any complications.
Coming up, killer filler,
the woman injected with bathroom sealant.
This green stuff burst out of my face.
A butchered nose.
Horrifyingly, the tip of my nose was missing.
And the boob job that never was.
It never crossed my mind that he hadn't put one in at all.
Last year over 43,000 of us
opted to go under the knife to enhance,
shrink or boost bits of our body in the name of beauty.
There are lots of facts and figures about what can go wrong with cosmetic surgery,
but we rarely hear about
people who don't even get the operation they paid for.
For a patient to be admitted to hospital
to have a breast implant inserted,
for it not to be put in, would be extremely unusual.
But that's precisely what happened
to 26-year-old nail technician Rachael Dallimore.
In 2006, she forked out five grand
for a breast augmentation.
I was a size, probably cup size D, double D-ish,
but then I fell pregnant at 16.
I lost all the elasticity in my skin
and I lost any volume I had in my boobs.
Miserable and self-conscious,
Rachael decided to get implants and an uplift.
When she woke up from the operation, nothing seemed untoward,
but after a few months, the scars weren't healing,
and her breasts still looked small and saggy.
She wanted a pert bust,
but she's ended up with droopy boobs and a mass of ugly scars.
I got in touch with the clinic
and they just fobbed me off, basically.
Said, you know, you need to wait
for the full 18 months and then we'll have a look.
Concerned, Rachael sought a second opinion.
After examining me,
he told me there wasn't an implant in.
He was shocked at the state that I was left in.
It never crossed my mind that he hadn't put one in at all.
Rachael was devastated.
She got back in touch with the clinic that did the surgery originally
but was left bitterly disappointed.
They basically said they'd done nothing wrong,
the procedure was done as it should have been.
Didn't explain
as to why the surgeon had decided not to put them in.
The whole experience has left Rachael feeling very low,
and her lack of confidence is affecting all areas of her life.
I was very nervous
about intimacy.
I don't like any lights on.
I can't get undressed in front of anyone.
No, none of that.
It's just not how I wanted to look.
It's not what I'd planned to happen, or what I'd paid to happen.
Hoping that something can be done to fix her botched up boobs,
Rachael's travelled to London to see plastic surgeon Nick Percival.
Those are very long and very poor scars.
I mean, you don't need me to tell you that.
Now, sadly, we cannot take away the scars
without leaving another one in its place,
that's just a rule. I mean,
because the only thing that we can do, which we can do,
is to cut out the scars
and make another one.
Now we've then go the option
of giving a little bit more volume
and shape to the breast by putting an implant in.
If we just did it on its own
without an implant, let us say,
we would expect to end up
with a breast of that sort of shape and size,
with the nipple now in that position there.
Rachael decides that she still wants bigger breasts
and opts to have the implants.
Every year in the UK 1.25 million of us
choose to pump our faces full of fillers
in the pursuit of eternal youth.
But the market's barely regulated.
Anyone from beauticians to builders can inject your face with fillers
after just a four-hour course.
Patients are none of the wiser as to what's being injected into them.
It's really not something that should be a high street product
that is injected by somebody with no medical knowledge whatsoever.
Your face is a potential filler war zone.
In all, there are 13 sites that can be plumped and smoothed.
The most common being your forehead, crow's feet,
frown lines, nasolabial folds,
mouth frown and cheeks.
In 2006, 46-year-old Vicki Bailey from Essex
paid £1,500
to have filler injections in her cheeks.
I needed something to kind of boost my confidence a little bit,
cos I was very conscious of some lines here
and some round here.
But the filler leached into other parts of her face
and became seriously infected.
Suddenly I had these big lumps, as big as peas,
underneath my eyes,
and then some had dropped down here.
But in the middle of the night I woke up in a lot of pain.
I went into the bathroom
and one of my eyes was closed up completely.
I was passing out with pain. It was excruciating.
Things got so bad she ended up in A&E terrified.
A doctor examined her and the news wasn't good.
I was told I was probably gonna lose my sight.
They had to keep forcing my eyes open
to make sure the infection wasn't going to my eyeball.
If it had gone in there, then it goes to my brain.
And he said once it goes to your brain that's it,
there's nothing we can do, you're gone.
After six days on a drip, the infection subsided,
but Vicki was left disfigured.
I felt like I looked like the elephant man.
I just felt so ugly.
My confidence was on the floor.
It got that bad that I even didn't wanna be here anymore.
It was only the fact that I had a daughter
that made me pull myself together and carry on.
She had no choice but to find a new clinic
and pay to have the filler removed.
Over the last six years, she's had three operations.
The initial £1,500 botched filler treatment
has already resulted in her shelling out £15,000
to try and have the filler removed.
But the corrective surgery was unable to take out all the filler,
leaving Vicki fearing it could flare up again.
Cos I've got scars under my eyes now,
trying to cover them up all the time.
I've still got lumps underneath my eye
and I'm constantly trying to push 'em down.
I'd hate for anybody to have to go through what I went through.
Desperate to know if anything else can be done,
she's in London to seek a second opinion
from consultant surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick.
She has had an MRI scan
to identify the location of the remaining filler,
and he wants to discuss the results.
Here are your eyeballs, and you can see that as we go down the face,
we're just coming to the bottom of the eyeball sockets,
you can see these little beads just there, there and there.
With the areas of concern now identified,
Niall goes through is plan for surgery.
We're gonna make a little cut just underneath the eyelashes
and then I can lift up the layer
and tunnel our way down,
so that hopefully you'll have a very fine little tiny scar
which should heal extremely well
and not cause any problems.
Sounds simple, but surgery near the delicate tissue of the eye
can be fraught with risks.
The most important risk, whenever you're operating round
there's a really tiny risk of blindness
from blood tracking behind the eyeball.
Niall will have to dig deep to rid Vicki's face of filler,
but will this finally mean an end to her six years of hell?
You can see that we're getting some of the more liquid filler out.
And the woman who is left disfigured after a botched nose job.
I just remember thinking,
"How on this earth has he done that to my nose?"
It was absolutely excruciating pain.
Following botched breast augmentation in 2006,
which not only left her with scarred, sagging boobs,
but also without the implants that she had paid for,
26-year-old Rachael Dallimore
has decided to go back under the knife.
She is at the Welbeck Hospital in London
under the care of plastic surgeon Nick Percival.
I'm really excited about not having all the scarring,
all that being gone after,
I think it's nearly seven years
that I've lived with it.
And later today it won't be there anymore.
There are three elements to the surgery.
The first part of the surgery is putting in the implant,
the second part is redoing the breast uplift,
the mastopexy,
and that combined with the third part
which is, of course, revising the scars.
The breasts have not really been well lifted,
and they've dropped significantly.
She's got really very, very bad scarring from this surgery,
much worse than we would expect from an operation like this.
And, unfortunately,
we can't make them any shorter
or move them into positions that they're not already in,
but I think we can make them cosmetically better than they are now.
In terms of their dimensions,
these I think probably the worst scars
that I've ever seen for this particular operation.
After injecting a mixture of local anaesthetic and adrenalin
to control bleeding,
Nick makes a pocket to put the new implant in.
This is a Nagor silicone gel implant.
It's 330 grams in weight.
Once the implant is in place,
Nick moves on to realigning the nipple position.
So, going to cut around
the nipple areola,
so we can move this in position.
Because the nipple at the moment is too low,
it's drooping down in the bottom of the breast,
so we're going to move it up into a new position.
He then starts to remove the outer layer of skin
and the old scars caused by Rachael's botched surgery.
Whether it's something inherent in the way that she heals,
or more likely it's something to do with
the way that the wounds were stitched together,
and perhaps there weren't enough
supportive stitched placed in it
when she had her original surgery.
Now the stitched I'm putting in now
are the stitches which I hope
will prevent that horrible stretched scar
from recurring.
These are dissolving stitches
and they should last a couple of months,
during which time the body will have, hopefully, stuck this together.
When he's happy with the left breast,
Nick moves on to the right.
When you're doing revision surgery of this type,
you've always got to be a little bit careful.
If you haven't done the first surgery, you're not quite sure
how the previous surgeon has done it,
and that potentially can lead to difficulties.
Nick gets to the end of surgery without encountering any problems.
With the implants definitely in this time
and the old scarring removed,
Rachael's seven-year ordeal could finally be over.
Rhinoplasty has become one of the most popular
cosmetic surgery procedures in the UK.
Last year, 4,518 of us
chose to go under the knife in pursuit of the perfect nose -
a rise of 7.4 % year on year.
As the number of surgeries increases,
so do the number of complications.
We are very much dealing with a three-dimensional structure.
So, a small manoeuvre of a millimetre or so in one direction
will have significant effects on the nose in another direction,
which are not always completely predictable.
As 37-year-old Rita Payton from Liverpool found out.
Acutely self-conscious of her appearance,
she decided that she wanted surgery
to remove an imperfection on her nose.
I had a little bump just on the bridge,
and I just wanted that removed.
I just wasn't too happy with it.
Think I'd broke it a few times as well. I was getting a bit older
and I just wanted it sorted out just to make it look a little bit better,
As you get a little bit older you want things doing, don't you?
So that was what I wanted doing.
After extensive research,
she thought she'd found the perfect place to have her procedure.
She was expecting to wake up with a smooth nose,
but she's ended up botched,
with mangled nostrils and a tip that has been sliced clean off.
When Rita first came round from the operation
and looked in the mirror, she couldn't believe her eyes.
I saw it was a monster, it was horrible.
There was blood all over my face,
all down my neck.
Horrifyingly, the tip of my nose was missing,
and I just remember thinking,
"How on this earth has he done that to my nose?"
I couldn't breathe. I was petrified.
I literally feared for my life.
In pain and alone,
Rita was desperate to get home,
but her son's reaction to her appearance cut her to the quick.
And he was just like, "No, Mummy. No, Mummy."
Wouldn't come near me.
You just want a hug, don't ya, off your baby to make you feel better?
And he wouldn't. It was horrible.
And I knew that this was it for the rest of my life.
He'd made me look like a monster.
That's the only way I can describe it, like a monster.
Rita thought things would improve with time,
but as the swelling and bruising subsided
the full magnitude of her botched-up nose was revealed.
He'd somehow
cut me right nostril clean,
so it resembled a cat, or a dog if you like,
the way the noses have got slits in.
This nostril was completely caved in.
And the bump that I'd paid to have removed
off my nose was still there.
Rita's surgeon offered her corrective surgery,
but all he did was cut into her nostril
and fill her with filler,
a procedure that seriously affected her ability to breathe.
I was sitting in the back kitchen with my son,
who was four, and we were playing pat-a-cake,
and next thing I had this pain in my side,
like I've never felt in my life,
and I knew my lung had collapsed.
And I knew straight away it was all to do with my nose.
The pain, it was nothing but pain, pain and agony.
It was awful.
With her life now at risk,
Rita was able to seek help on the NHS.
She went on to have two operations,
but in spite of intensive rebuilding,
she still needs more help.
Today, she is at the Whiston Hospital in Liverpool
to see her plastic surgeon Mr Azhar Iqbal.
He was shocked and appalled when he first saw the results
of her botched surgery.
Even for the normal rhinoplasty, you would not expect nostril to collapse.
I think it's a disaster.
Part of the problem, as I said,
this nostril was very, very tight.
The problem still with the scarring, the nose still tends to pull to one...
Lift up your chin for me, please.
Yeah, I can see this pulling a little bit to one side.
During her corrective surgery,
Rita had cartilage taken from her rib grafted to the bridge of her nose.
Mr Iqbal suggests further surgery, but there are risks.
The drawback is that it gives you more fullness in this area,
which is less desirable.
The only problem sometime, to shave it off,
we have to raise the whole skin.
It may become a little bit unstable and displaced again,
but there are things which are unpredictable.
I understand that, yeah, you said that to me last time.
- So, we'll see how much we can do safely. - OK.
Unfortunately for Rita,
no amount of surgery will totally fix her botched-up nose.
It's sadly something she'll have to live with.
My expectations are not to look too far ahead,
just to take each day as it comes.
I'm very angry at the fact that the doctor who originally done my surgery
is out there right now
doing the same thing to someone else.
I've been to hell and back through what I've been through.
I will always have a disfigured nose for the rest of my life.
For many women, big is definitely not beautiful.
Last year 5,000 over-endowed ladies
decided to get a breast reduction.
Of those, 5% had complications.
All cosmetic surgery operations have a sort of danger,
if you like, that you don't want to occur.
In breast reductions it's always the blood supply to the nipple.
28-year-old single mum from Brighton Sarah Taylor
had a problem with her nipples,
but it wasn't down to the blood supply.
Having always hated her 32F boobs,
she decided to get a breast reduction,
downsizing to a smaller, more pert pair.
Having big boobs and being quite young,
I found quite awkward.
If you went out, men would comment on them
and that made me really insecure.
I wanted to have them reduced
so that I could get rid of some of the sagging
and also some of the weight, cos it was causing a lot of back problems.
Miserable and self-conscious,
Sarah decided to get a breast reduction
at a clinic she'd found in the back of a magazine.
When I went in for surgery, I was really, really excited.
I knew that afterwards
I would walk away confident and happy in myself.
When I came round I could see,
even underneath the bandages, the result would look better
because it was a lot smaller than I was used to
and it felt a lot lighter.
I was feeling quite happy and quite at ease and comfortable.
But her initial excitement turned into crushing disappointment.
She paid £6,000 for the op
that left her botched up
with nipple tissue in all the wrong places.
I just ended up bursting into tears.
I had what looked like old nipple
underneath my nipple that hadn't been cut away.
When the surgeon admitted that he'd botched the operation,
leaving her with excess nipple tissue underneath each breast,
she bitterly regretted not spending more time choosing the clinic.
If I could turn back time, I would have done a lot more research.
I just saw this advert in the back of a magazine
and because it was in a reputable magazine,
I just assumed that it was a reputable company.
Whereas now, I'd rather take the time and make sure that I got the right result.
Her hasty decision
has ended up affecting every area of her life.
I found it really hard to trust boyfriends from that point
because I didn't wanna take my clothes off in front of anybody,
and to think, you know,
that they were gonna accept me
with the problems that I have with my breasts,
in case they saw it and thought, you know, I was some kind of freak.
With her self-confidence in shreds,
Sarah has travelled to Harley Street in London's West End
to see consultant plastic surgeon Nick Percival.
She wants to know if he can do anything
to rid her of the unsightly excess nipple tissue for good.
The brown discolouration in the skin,
which was round the areola and has now been moved down,
in my view can be removed.
And, at the same time,
problems with the scar tissue
that you showed me there, particularly on the left breast,
that can be addressed as well.
But it's not all good news.
Now, I'm afraid you are going to have to recognise that
any second operation is more risky than the first one.
- Right. OK. - Generally speaking.
The previous operation has disrupted
the blood supply to various tissues
and we have to recognise that
and be prepared for that.
If the blood supply is further disrupted, the risks for Sarah are quite significant.
And you could lose all sensation in one or both nipples
- with a revision operation. - Right, OK.
And that could be permanent.
But it's a risk Sarah believes is worth taking
to get rid of her excess nipple tissue.
To me it does feel like it's necessary,
but I'm nervous about the after effect.
Plus, botched up beyond repair.
The woman injected with industrial grade bathroom sealant.
I felt like a monster,
some sideshow circus freak.
In the UK, the number of cosmetic fillers
on the market is on the rise.
But unlike breast implants and botox,
dermal fillers are deemed to have no medical purpose,
and are regulated in the same way as toothbrushes
and ballpoint pens.
It's no wonder that these permanent beauty boosters
are leaving people with very permanent problems.
Six years ago, mum of two Vicki
had filler injected into her cheeks, but it migrated.
If the infection,
which is caused by the filler, flares up again,
it could potentially kill her.
They said once it goes to your brain, that's it,
there's nothing we can do, you're gone.
She's about to go under the knife
to have cosmetic filler removed from under her eyes.
Vicki is under the care of surgeon Niall Kirkpatrick.
Putting filler material in is very easy,
getting permanent filler material out is very difficult.
God!
Going dizzy now, am I meant to be?
Yeah, that's the cocktail.
It's an extra strong one.
God, it's like having about ten vodkas!
My general, personal feeling is that
permanent filler should be banned,
because the vast majority of problems that we are seeing
are related to the permanent fillers.
What we're going to do first of all
is just put some marks
on where the area that we need to remove is.
You can see that as we put the local anaesthetic in,
the eyelid swells a little bit
so we start to lose the definition of where the lumps were,
which is why we mark them out beforehand.
I'll take a corneal shield, please.
So just to protect the eye itself,
we just put one of these in during the surgery.
Niall is placing a stitch in the eyelid
which will enable him to manipulate the area more easily.
Next, he makes his incision.
So, what I'm doing now
is just separating the skin away from the muscle
until we get down to the area
where the granulomas are coming through.
Just here we've got a little yellow granuloma here.
It's just a very small one.
You have this line of yellow material
all the way along the lid here.
This is what's giving the lid that very yellow look to it.
I'm going to start to remove that.
This is just a question of painstakingly removing this material.
So, you can see that as I squeeze the lid,
you can see that we're getting some of the more liquid filler out,
some of it is the reaction to the filler.
So far Niall has worked on the area closest to Vicki's eyelid,
but it's time to move deeper.
So, you can see here we have really quite a firm granuloma
as a sort of reaction to the filler material.
We've now tunnelled past the area that we've marked out,
so now I can concentrate on trying to get it lovely and smooth
and remove the yellow.
Painstakingly, Niall removes each small granuloma,
syringing the eye of blood and tissue as he goes.
I can't see any major irregularities anywhere now.
OK, let's got everything dry.
Having removed all the beads of filler,
Niall closes up, then puts local anaesthetic in the eye
to reduce bruising and swelling.
After this, her fourth operation,
Vicki is now free of the last traces of filler.
After two weeks of healing, Vicki is back in London
for her final consultation with Niall.
So, it will take a little bit longer to settle,
I just need you to keep doing that little tiny circles like that
and that'll start to smooth and settle it.
The damage caused by her original
£1,500 filler injections
ended up costing in excess of
£20,000 in corrective surgery.
I'm just really happy with it, I really am happy. I'm so pleased.
Well, it's gonna be even better than it is at the moment,
much better, cos when that little ridge has gone it will also be much better.
Yeah, it's better just now, even now looking at it.
I'm over the moon when I look in the mirror.
No probs, they've all gone.
Niall has removed the tiny balls of filler
that were shattering Vicki's confidence,
now her face is totally free of filler
and her six year nightmare is finally over.
It's changed the way I feel about myself.
I had no confidence whatsoever.
I was just so scared and paranoid,
everybody, when I was talking to them,
they were looking at these awful little lumps
which looked like peas under my skin.
And it's amazing looking at my face now
and I haven't got them it's fantastic. I feel over the moon.
And I think it shows in my personality,
I'm not all shy and don't wanna talk anymore,
people can't stop me talking now.
In a market that is barely regulated, Vicki is one of the lucky ones.
But for others who have had their face cosmetically injected,
there is no quick fix when it all goes wrong.
In the US, where the filler industry is tightly regulated,
you'd expect the number of botches to be much lower,
but greater regulations create other risks.
It costs around £150 for a syringe of filler in the UK,
but in America it's $1,000.
The sky-high prices stateside
are pushing people onto the black market where they're being injected with cheap,
illegal and sometimes lethal fillers.
You can have these injections done and you're gonna die,
and it's definitely not worth,
you know, saving a few hundred dollars
to have your cheeks injected with something that could kill you.
Rajee Narinesingh, a 46-year-old activist from Florida,
had fillers injected into her cheeks on the black market.
Desperate to feel more womanly,
she thought they would enhance her femininity.
I considered myself to be an attractive person,
however I felt that there was something missing.
I didn't have the body that I wanted.
I didn't feel that I was feminine enough,
like, I felt like I needed more.
But she got much, much more than she bargained for.
a black-market practitioner filled her face
with industrial grade bathroom sealant,
leaving her with a botched-up, infected face.
I couldn't afford to do it the right way,
the right way being
going to a certified plastic surgeon.
To save money,
Rajee started asking friends for recommendations
for black market practitioners, and was told about a local woman.
She came across very knowledgeable about what she was doing.
She assured me
that what she was injecting in me was medical silicone
and, based on those facts,
I felt pretty confident
that she was gonna take good care of me.
But Rajee was wrong.
I laid on that table in her room
and she started to inject
what I thought was medical silicone into me.
You know the saying beauty is pain?
That day I had to, literally,
chant that in my head, because it hurt like hell.
She told me that, you know, this is normal.
After she finished the injection,
she would plug them with super glue,
and I'm laying there thinking,
"My God, what have you done?"
But once the pain wore off,
Rajee was delighted with the result.
So, delighted, in fact, that she went back
for more filler in her body.
And I figured I'd work my way down.
So, the next thing was to get injections in my breast.
And then I proceeded to do
my hips and my buttocks.
Bur Rajee's newfound confidence was short-lived.
Just nine months later,
she woke up to find she'd suffered a horrible reaction
to the bathroom sealant
that had just been injected into her face.
When I think about that day,
I get very emotional, I really do,
because it was the beginning
of a lot of hard times for me.
The whole left side of my face felt like a huge boil,
and I couldn't understand what was going on with me.
And, all of a sudden...
this green stuff
burst out of my face on the mirror,
and it was just pus oozing out of my face,
just disgusting.
And, unfortunately for Rajee, that was just the beginning.
I felt like a monster.
You know, I'd walk out in public and people would look at me
like I'm some freak,
some sideshow circus freak,
that's basically how it was.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning
and I'm laying in my bed thinking,
"What did you do to yourself?
What did you do to yourself?"
I did think about suicide, I did.
So...
it's been a rough road.
Since then, Rajee's had two emergency operations,
but because the filler has bound with her tissue,
now her only option
is to try and soften it with laser treatment.
She's booked an appointment with her plastic surgeon
and hopes desperately that he can help her further.
Following an operation to remove excess scarring
from a previous botched boob job,
Rachael is back in London for a consultation
with her plastic surgeon, Nick Percival.
Still a little of bruising hanging around
but that's pretty much...
I think, what we would expect this stage.
It all looks good,
and they feel reasonably soft, I think, for this stage.
The unsightly scars have been removed
and her breasts have been given an uplift.
- Are you pleased with it so far? - Yeah. Yes.
And has it sort of achieved
what you really wanted to get from the original surgery?
Yeah, it has. It's exactly what I wanted.
There will always be a scar there,
but hopefully it will not be as wide
as the scars that were there before.
But essentially,
we've now got the shape back that you wanted.
Rachael is also confident in the knowledge
that this time round the implants that she's asked for
have actually been put in.
This is all I wanted from the start.
I never wanted massive boobs,
I just wanted 'em to be nice shape, just where they should be.
For seven years,
Rachael lived with the results of her previous operation.
Now she can start regaining her confidence
and put here botched up surgery behind her.
Absolutely over the moon with the result.
Waking up in morning and then looking
and it's all different. It's amazing. I love it.
But will Sarah's operation, to have excess nipple tissue removed,
be just as successful?
There's usually a stage in the operation
you think something has gone fairly seriously wrong.
And Rajee has treatment to try and free herself from the bathroom sealant
that was injected into her face.
Yeah, it's still pretty hard once I'm in there,
it's why it's so hard to inject.
In Florida, a transatlantic botched-up body is about to get help.
46-year-old activist Rajee
is on her way to see plastic surgeon Dr John Martin.
She wants him to fix her filler-injected face,
after a black market practitioner injected her
with industrial grade silicone
normally used as bathroom sealant,
leaving her disfigured and in pain.
You know I'd walk out in public
and people would look at me like I'm some freak,
some sideshow circus freak.
Hi, Rajee. How are you?
Dr Martin is working to reduce the nodules of filler in her cheeks.
When I first walked in to see Rajee,
my first impression was just wow,
this is unbelievable what has happened to her face.
She said to me, "I feel like a monster. I look like a monster,"
and she was crying.
I really felt incredibly sorry for her,
because she had done something to try to improve her appearance
and ended up with a totally deformed face.
Let's start in here first.
Today, he'll be starting her next course of treatment.
See how these nodules are doing.
These are almost gone.
It's your magic.
These were much larger
and they really came out like distinct,
very distinct huge nodules
that you wouldn't have been able
to move them like you can now,
because they're so much softer.
When people have small nodules, we would just go in and take them out,
but that means you have to do some sort of a surgery.
And hers were very large, so what I ended up doing
was an incision on one side initially...
almost like a facelift incision,
dissecting down under the skin
and trying to take out the nodules on one side,
just to see if I could do this.
They were so hard
that I really couldn't even cut through them with my scissors,
so it was a very, very difficult procedure.
I was able to take some of the substance out,
but she still ended up with some residual nodules.
OK, so I have a little bit of our steroid here.
The injection will shrink
and soften the remaining pockets of filler,
making removal eventually possible.
Yeah, it's still pretty hard once I'm in there,
it's why it's so hard to inject.
- Yeah, just rub in that in for me. - Beauty is pain.
Pain is beauty, right?
Rajee is also having laser treatment
normally used for hair removal.
The intense pulse light machine
sends heat into the deeper layers of the skin,
which softens the lumps of filler.
After a number of treatments,
the filler should rise up through the face tissue
to the epidermis just below the skin.
Once there it can be removed.
As we start to shrink down these nodules,
the question is what's gonna be left in there?
Is the muscle gone? Is the fat gone?
And is she gonna then be hollow and depleted?
Then we have to figure out another way
to sort of fill it in so it looks smooth.
Unfortunately for Rajee there's no quick fix,
and she will have to endure many more treatments
before she can even begin to get rid of the bathroom sealant
that's left her face botched.
But she can at least be thankful to be alive.
The woman that injected Rajee is also now up on manslaughter charges
for one of her patients who died after her injections.
My message to anyone out there
who may be considering going for these
black market injectables, don't do it.
Don't do it.
Because you can end up dead,
or you can end up like me.
Mum of one Sarah
has decided to take the risk of losing sensation in both of her nipples
and go under the knife for a second time
to get her botched-up boob job fixed.
She is at the Welbeck Hospital in London
worried how her recovery period will affect her daughter.
I'm nervous about the after effects,
like not being able to look after Lily the same way,
or not being able to cuddle her and stuff.
I find that quite upsetting,
but I'm just trying to remain as calm as I possibly can.
Surgeon Nick Percival is set to operate.
Cosmetic surgery operations have a sort of
single important detail,
a sort of danger if you like, that you don't want to occur,
in breast reductions it's always the blood supply to the nipple.
- You ever seen this before, Sati? - No, never.
I haven't seen this much.
Nick plans to redo the breast reduction
and get rid of the excess nipple tissue that's left her so unhappy.
The first thing we have to do
is we have to make, what we call,
the pedicel.
This is the piece of breast that contains the nipple's blood supply.
If it becomes damaged, it could lead to necrosis,
a devastating complication
which could see the breasts rot and die.
One hour in, Nick starts the delicate process
of removing the epidermis, the outer layer of skin.
We're not taking all the skin off
because I know that the network of blood vessels
which supply the skin
lie just deep underneath what we call the dermis,
which is the deep, thicker layer of the skin.
It's an important part of the surgery,
because of course if we lose the blood supply of the nipple and areola
it will go black and fall off.
So effectively, you see, this nipple now
is on an island, isn't it really?
It's living off the blood supply which is coming through from here
into the nipple, which keeps it alive.
Nick works carefully to avoid damage to the nipple
as he cuts and discards any excess breast tissue.
It's usually around about this stage in the operation,
when you're seeing it for the first time,
that you think something has gone fairly seriously wrong,
and once we start putting things back together
you'll sort of see how it's all gonna fit.
Nick has cut away the excess tissue,
as well as decreasing Sarah's bust a little further.
I want the nipple to look pink,
because pink is good cos that means it's got a good blood supply.
Nick manages to get to the end of the operation
without any damage to the blood supply,
which means he can now close up.
At long last Sarah's free
from the unsightly excess nipple tissue.
Her boobs have been lifted and reduced.
Three weeks later,
Sarah goes to see Nick for her final consultation.
And how have things been?
Really good. Yeah, I'm really happy with the result.
You know that with these sorts of operations,
it does take time for everything to settle down
but, you know, you've made a fast recovery.
We've have no issues or problems at all.
Nick has removed the excess nipple tissue
and unsightly scars left behind from her previous botched boob job,
giving her pert, symmetrical breasts.
I can see no good reason
why that tissue was not removed
at the initial operation.
I do consider it poor, unsatisfactory surgery.
So, overall, are you glad you did it?
Really glad. Really happy with the shape, everything. Really happy.
Over the moon with the results,
Sarah now feels she can move on with her life.
I think the results are amazing.
The surgery has far surpassed what I expected.
I just feel like a whole new person.
I'm, like her, very pleased with the outcome of the surgery.
We've achieved a nice result,
so that's what we wanted to do, that's what we've done.
Lovely, thank you.
Now that I've had the surgery,
it's made me feel like I've got a whole new lease of life.
It's fantastic.
The pursuit of perfection has seen more and more people taking risks.
They wanted a better body but have ended up with a botched-up body
and a hefty bill to repair it.
With risks and complications, even if you tell patients,
"Well, there's only a 5% chance it's gonna happen,"
most people will think,
"Well, I'm gonna be in the 95 percent that it doesn't."
But the only people who never have any problems,
are the people who never do any surgery.