Over 43,000 Brits were nipped and tucked last year,
shelling out nearly £3 billion for the privilege.
Plastic surgery is about
what you can have, not what you want.
More and more though are discovering
that plastic is not always fantastic
as they end up with botched-up bodies.
People need to realise that this is not a game.
It's something that can seriously damage them.
Tonight, left deflated by gastric surgery.
I'm left with the shell of the fat woman.
Toxic filler,
the silicone injections that ended in amputation.
My God, I'm going to lose my hands and my feet.
And a terrifying eye op.
And I screamed out, he said, "Don't scream.
If you scream, things can go wrong."
Britain is getting fatter.
Researchers predict that up to 48% of men
and 43% of women in the UK
could be obese by 2030.
In the battle to beat obesity,
weight loss surgery has become the new weapon.
Unfortunately, the more successful the operation,
the more likely it will result in disfiguring side effects
and the bigger you start out, the bigger the problem.
The consequence of that massive weight loss
is massive skin excess, and it's increasingly common.
At her heaviest, Marie,
a 43-year-old mum of four from Nottinghamshire,
weighed over 50 stone.
The problems with her weight started when she was 16,
after her mum passed away.
She was very overweight herself and had a heart attack,
and she died in my arms,
and I just felt like
the only thing that was there for me at the time was food.
Food made me...
Food made me... Sorry.
Food was my emotional crutch
and food was my comfort.
Over the next five years,
she added 16 stones of fat to her tiny frame.
Desperate, she turned to the NHS for help.
I had surgery in June 2010,
I had a gastric sleeve and that's where
they remove 85% of your stomach
so you're left with a little pouch the size of a banana.
She rapidly lost weight but her skin,
that had for years been stretched over her bulky frame,
had lost all its elasticity,
and now hung in unsightly saggy pendulous folds.
The surgery has fixed my weight
but I'm left with the shell of the fat woman
and I'm not a fat woman any more.
If it wasn't for the NHS to start off with,
she wouldn't be here now and I know that so,
eternally grateful.
It's just this part here.
The NHS have turned down
on four or five occasions to remove the excess skin
from her belly,
saying that she doesn't really need it.
Skin removal costs up to £6,000
but with NHS budgets stretched,
who should pick up the bill is a contentious issue.
In our survey, 46% of you said
the procedure shouldn't be available on the NHS.
It's not a view Marie shares.
There needs to be more help.
When you get to the end of your journey,
you really do need to be told that,
"Yes, OK, we'll do the excess skin for you.
We'll get it sorted. You've done the hard work,
now we'll finish it off."
But I just feel like I'm a complete freak.
Her mass of unruly skin affects every aspect of her life.
I'd say for the last year, year and a half,
we haven't slept in the same bed,
cos I'm, I just, I just don't like the thought of him seeing me naked.
I definitely don't want him touching it.
But like I've said to her, it doesn't bother me at all.
You know, married her because I loved her.
I just...
just awful dreaded fear that he's, he's going to run a mile.
Unable to get help on the NHS,
the only way forward is to go private.
Marie's XXL skin suit
needs a surgical re-tailoring.
The man tasked with the job
is specialist surgeon Peter Arnstein.
Come and lie yourself down,
make yourself comfortable a second, please.
Now if we're going to take this fold away,
probably what we would do is to take off the main fold,
so it comes out like a wing and closes up,
leaving you a scar
which goes from hip to hip and vertically here.
Marie's rapid weight loss
has left her with long lifeless sagging breasts.
Now, when I look at these, they may seem empty to you
but actually if I, excuse me,
folding you around, a bit of origami,
if I bring this up like this,
you'll see that there's quite a good volume of breast there.
Right? It's not all skin, it's breast tissue
and if we can make a volume that size,
would you be happy with that? Yeah?
Peter decides to tackle Marie's arms,
breasts, stomach and legs in one mammoth operation.
Coming up, toxic terror.
Disastrous silicone injections.
They were all you know just black and swollen and gangrene.
Botched breasts.
Big boobs gone bad.
It looks like something from a horror film.
It's ruined my life basically.
And Marie goes under the knife.
So, here's the first side of Marie's tummy.
Billions of pounds are spent on cosmetic procedures
in the UK every year.
Dermal fillers are one of the most popular treatments,
perfect for people looking to plump and smooth.
Their use is largely unregulated in Britain.
Anybody, anywhere, anytime, can give a filler to anybody else.
In the States, however,
their use is tightly regulated which is reflected in the price.
The latest craze Stateside is buttock augmentation.
There are many techniques to achieve buttock augmentation,
including implants and injection techniques.
Injections, in particular silicone,
are very dangerous and one needs about
two or three hundred cc's to make any real change.
And that amount of filler comes with a hefty price tag.
It costs around £150
for a syringe of filler in the UK,
but in the US it's $1,000.
As a result, a booming unregulated black market has emerged
and with it, terrible risks.
As mum of two, April found out
when her quest for the perfect bottom left her fighting for her life
and ultimately losing her arms and legs.
A young lady came into my salon
and she was like, "You know, I do butt injections."
I was like, "I want that!"
I've been wanting that all my life so that's kind of how it happened.
It came to me, I felt like, "My God I'm so blessed!
God's looking out for me. April, you're so blessed."
April did no research into her qualifications
and had no idea what was going to be injected.
I never knew what the stuff was made of.
I just thought it was silicone.
I didn't even have any idea that it was different phases of silicone,
like industrial grade silicone, medical grade silicone.
I had no idea.
April was injected with non-medical grade silicone.
Unlike its medical counterpart,
it can contain lethal impurities.
The only end point on silicone injections is removal,
removal when it's not infected
or removal when it's infected and it's about to kill you.
This is silicone gel that you would get at a hardware store
that you would use to caulk your bathtub
and this tube here is just a fraction of what was injected into April.
Her body was flooded with a toxic chemical.
My actual problem started 2005,
because it started to get hard.
And it started to get discoloured.
By 2006, it started to itch
and, by 2007, the pain started.
One thing about pain, you can't turn it off.
I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat,
I couldn't concentrate.
But that was just the beginning
of a terrifying chain of events.
I had gone to this party one Saturday night.
I wake up Sunday morning and I'm like,
"My God, April!" I just couldn't pull myself together.
As the day progressed, her condition deteriorated.
That night was the roughest night of my life.
That night I literally scratched
all of the skin
off of my buttocks.
My nails
scratched all of the skin
off of my butt
and when my sister came in and she saw that, it just freaked her out.
April was rushed to hospital.
I first met April
in the emergency department at Torsmorial Medical Centre.
She was in shock from sepsis,
that's infection throughout her body.
Dr Black feared the worst,
telling April she had just a day to live.
I didn't think about my children,
I didn't think about my mother.
I thought about, "My God,
in 26 hours I'll be out of pain."
In a last-ditch attempt to save her life,
she was placed in a medically induced coma.
I can't tell you how many hours I spent with her.
Day and night in the ICU and the OR,
doing wound care, stopping bleeding vessels.
She nearly died multiple times.
It would be a month before April was brought out of her coma.
She was awake but the nightmare continued.
Looking at the eyes of my family,
you know, my children, my mother and I'm thinking,
"My God, whatever this is, it's bad."
You know, because they just had these looks on their faces
and I can feel that they were hiding something from me,
but I just couldn't figure out what it was.
Doctors had had to amputate her buttocks,
but that wasn't all.
I just kind of moved the cover
and I saw my right foot,
and I was like,
"My God!"
And that moment, that's when it got real
because they were all, you know, just black and swollen
and, you know, just necrotic and gangrene
and, something just said, "OK, you know, look at your hands."
So, I looked and that's when it got really real
because I'm like, "My God!
I'm going to lose my hands and my feet."
The life-saving drugs had caused blood
to be diverted away from her extremities
to keep her heart, liver and kidneys working
while she battled the infection.
As a result,
her limbs were starved of oxygen and had died.
Doctors broke the news that they would have to be amputated.
Standing here, I'll be standing here.
Closer to living my life
and although I'm crying,
it makes me feel very excited.
Following the operation, and finally free of pain,
April slowly started to rebuild her life.
As time has passed,
April has adapted to life without her hands and legs.
Now it's just my new normal.
Now it's just different.
Now I just don't wake up and jump up on my legs.
I have to wake up and click on my prosthetics.
The hands, that's more challenging
because you don't really realise
how much you really do with them until you don't have them.
All this for a butt!
That spur of the moment decision
to have filler injected has cost April dear,
and she's determined to warn others of the risks.
Don't ever do anything without researching it,
and definitely don't do anything on the black market.
It's not about how you fall down,
it's not about making choices that end up catastrophic.
It's about knowing how to get up
and the only thing
that will ever make you feel better about yourself
is just feeling like you are enough,
that you are enough and no matter what it is,
how it looks, how it feels, that it's enough.
Buttocks augmentation is relatively uncommon in the UK.
The same cannot be said about breast enlargements.
With nearly 10,000 ladies going under the knife every year,
it's the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure for women
but the increase in operations
has seen an increase in complications,
with more and more women
being left mutilated and miserable,
like mum of three Jackie Onassis.
My boobs became saggy,
droopy and non-existent, and this made me very depressed.
Jackie decided the only way forward was to have surgery,
and she's not alone.
In our survey 63% of women questioned
said a boost in self-confidence
was the main reason they'd have breast surgery.
I met the surgeon and he showed me
various different sizes of implants.
The surgeon advised Jackie to have large implants
at a cost of £3,200.
Initially, she was over the moon with the results.
It brought me a lot of confidence.
I was able to wear nice-looking, pretty bras
and I went out quite a lot
because I was so excited about my implants,
and a lot of happiness.
But the happiness wasn't to last.
After the birth of her third child,
Jackie started to experience problems.
After I stopped breast-feeding I noticed that the shape of my boobs had changed.
It became quite rippled on top.
Jackie went back to her surgeon.
He suggested even larger implants to counteract the problem.
She paid another 3,900
and went back under the knife.
It's a decision Jackie would live to regret.
She's been left with rippling breasts
caused by implants that are way too big for her.
I noticed a ripple
and I was just distraught this time
because I'd paid so much money and I was still getting the same problem.
Jackie returned to the clinic for answers.
I saw a different surgeon and found out
that the surgeon that performed my operation
wasn't working for the company anymore.
He looked at them and said that if I did massaging techniques,
it would help and that he wasn't prepared to operate on me.
Now I'm left with like this big implants
and, you know,
it's really taken my confidence away from me again.
It's ruined my life basically.
Jackie's paid out £7,100
and has ugly rippled breasts.
Desperate to find out if anything can be done,
she's in London to see plastic surgeon
and breast specialist Patrick Mallucci.
So, I mean, yeah, obviously,
this is very visible rippling, isn't it?
These are the effects that you see
over a long period of time of large implants,
stretching skin, compressing your breast tissue.
Moving forward,
there are a few things that we need to consider.
You're going to need a significantly smaller implant
but in downsizing,
we're going to have lots of extra skin.
That will essentially mean
having to trim all this excess skin
around your new implant
and I think, you know, unless we take those measures,
then you're always going to have a very,
you know, odd-looking breasts.
She's left to decide whether smaller implants and scarring
is a price she's willing to pay for ripple-free breasts.
Surgery always comes with risks no matter how skilled the surgeon.
Six percent of patients will suffer unavoidable complications.
That risk is magnified in the case of Marie.
The mother of four is about to undergo
not one but four procedures
in a bid to free her from the folds of excess skin
left following weight loss surgery.
I'm left with the shell of the fat woman,
and I'm not a fat woman anymore.
Surgeon Peter Arnstein will lead the team operating.
First Peter marks Marie up,
similar to a tailor marking out a pattern before they cut the fabric.
This will act as a guide during surgery.
Marie is just minutes away from the operation
she so desperately wants,
but as it inches ever closer,
the magnitude of what is about to happen hits her.
I'm just a bit worried now.
No, you'll be alright.
It's all real, I just want to get it done.
- I'll come back a different woman. - You will.
The waiting is over.
It's time to say goodbye.
Peter and a team of four surgeons
will remove the excess skin from her stomach,
arms and legs as well as lifting her sagging bust.
Marie's skin is covered with an antiseptic solution
to make sure all areas are completely sterile.
Then Peter begins to work on her stomach.
People who have lost massive weight,
the blood vessels will be huge.
They grow huge in order to supply blood
to the big tummy.
When they lose weight, although the weight goes down,
the blood vessels remain very, very big.
They are up to ten times their normal size
and must be carefully tied off to avoid excessive bleeding.
The re-tailoring of Marie's skin is well under way.
The surgeons working on her arms
have to decide how much skin to leave.
The excess skin Marie has got here
will allow me when I close the wound, finally,
to recontour the arm like that.
Happy that they will be able to close the wound without any tension,
they begin to suture it closed.
Peter evaluates how much excess skin
to cut away from Marie's stomach.
There's a massive amount of surplus
so we're just marking off the level
at which we'll cut this huge flap of skin
off Marie.
And so here's the first side
of the fat and skin from Marie's tummy.
You can see it weighs quite a few pounds.
After three hours and 43 minutes on the operating table,
the team are nearly halfway through the operation.
Both arms have been lifted
and the mass of excess skin has been removed from her abdomen.
Time's flying for Marie
but the same cannot be said for her husband, Paul.
She means the world to me.
Just makes my life fun and enjoyable
and I'm just so proud of her.
She's got what she's wanted.
This will be massive for her.
This, I would consider
one of the most difficult bits of the operation.
A very saggy breast
is very difficult to manipulate, keep under control.
Peter begins by cutting around her nipple
and removing the skin from the breast tissue.
This is the area where we've removed the surplus skin
and now we're undermining the skin
in order to allow the nipple to rise up.
We'll be running a stitch such that it foreshortens the whole breast
into the mounds and tightens it up.
Marie's breast tissue will concertina in on itself,
giving her new bust volume without the need for implants.
After seven hours and ten minutes,
the team have removed 6.5 kilos of excess skin
but Marie has lost over three pints of blood
so Peter decides not to attempt to remove the excess skin from her legs.
This will now be removed in a second operation.
With the surgery over for now,
the hard work can begin, the healing process.
Coming up, blind terror after eye surgery.
When I woke up, I saw black.
Then I panicked and thought "My gosh, I can't see."
The aftermath of a mangled moob job.
I don't know why he thought he had to take so much away.
It looks awful in my mind.
And Marie's recovery hits problems.
When you're seeing holes in your body that aren't supposed to be there,
it's very scary.
There's been a 6% increase year on year
in people having cosmetic procedures in the UK.
There's also been a sharp increase in the number of people
opting to go under the knife abroad in the name of beauty.
Cheaper prices maybe the most common reason to go abroad
but another factor is access to procedures
that are not available in the UK's regulated market,
procedures like permanently changing the colour of your eyes.
Never in my years as an ophthalmologist
had I seen or even heard of this as a procedure.
In my book, it's just, you know, not, not ethical.
Iris implants involve a coloured disc,
similar to a contact lens, being surgically inserted into the eye.
The procedure can come with risks that may include
infection, glaucoma,
cataracts and blindness,
a high price to pay for looking good.
Shenise Farrell from West London
wanted to permanently lighten her dark brown eyes.
In 2009,
she found a clinic that could do just that,
much to the horror of her friends and family.
They even said I was crazy.
I said, "Don't worry. When I come back with my new eyes,
you won't be saying I'm crazy."
She forked out £8,000
and jetted off to Panama,
to one of the few places in the entire world
that carries out the procedure.
I was so determined to get the surgery done.
Nothing rang alarm bells for me, nothing obvious.
Before she headed off,
Shenise picked out the light brown colour she wanted.
When I got there, the day of the surgery,
and got to the clinic,
they had showed me a blue colour
and they said this is the colour that they're going to put in
and I said to them I didn't want that colour.
I originally chose brown.
They said they haven't got any brown at the moment, they're out of stock.
I just thought my eye colour is going to change anyway,
let me just accept it,
let me just accept the blue colour.
The following day,
she found herself staring into the surgeon's scalpel
as he sliced her eyes and inserted the coloured irises.
I screamed out, he said, "Don't scream,
because it doesn't hurt. If you scream, things can go wrong."
The operation took only 20 minutes.
Her eyes were now blue but she was in for a nasty shock.
I couldn't see properly.
It looked like I was looking underwater.
He said, "İt's OK, some patients are different.
Some see clearer now
and some see clearer in about two weeks' time."
Her eyesight got progressively worse
and once back home, her vision was so severely impaired
she took herself to A&E.
They sort of showed me a chart
with letters on it
and I couldn't even see the top letter.
At this point they said
they hadn't seen anything like this before, so they didn't know what to do.
Mr Ali Mierza, consultant ophthalmic surgeon
at Charing Cross Hospital, was called in.
Given the vision that she had was finger counting only,
for all intents and purposes,
you could register her blind.
Ali knew the implants had to come out
and despite a risk of permanent blindness,
Shenise went back under the knife.
I was willing to take that chance.
I had already taken the worst chance ever
by getting the implants in my eye in the first place.
We made a little incision at the edge of the cornea.
We then entered the eye and put a bit of,
what's called, disco-elastic or jelly substance into the eye
to allow us to manipulate the implant.
So in order to get it out,
I made little incisions in the implant itself
to allow to sort of fold it a little bit
and then managed to manipulate it
in order to grab one edge of it and then pulled it out of the eye.
Once both implants were out, there was still no guarantee
that her sight had been restored.
When I woke up, I saw black
but then I panicked and thought, "My gosh,
I can't see!" But if my vision goes, my life would be over.
Luckily for Shenise,
the black she saw was just the bandages covering her eyes
and they were soon removed.
Then he said, "What can you see?" I said, "It's blurry."
And then he said, "Can you see my hand movements?"
And I said, "Yes." He said, "That's a good sign."
So, with every week that passed,
she got better and better and by about month two or three,
she reached the 20/20 point.
Now that my eyes are back to normal,
my eyes are brown
and it doesn't matter what shade of brown it is.
The main thing is that I could see.
Iris implants are not available in the UK,
so cases like that of Shenise are rare.
Complications following breast surgery however are common,
as mum of three Jackie discovered.
I'm left with these big implants
and it looks like something from a horror film.
Words can't express how I feel.
It's ruined my life, basically.
Plastic surgeon and breast specialist
Patrick Mallucci is set to operate.
What she's showing
are the real negative effects
of oversized implants.
We know that she has to go smaller.
I don't really know what I'm going to find when I'm inside
and I don't know whether she's been put under the muscle
or whether there's been an attempt.
What sort of scarring we'll find.
And so it's going to be, to a large extent,
a bit of a sort of a suck it and see type procedure.
The whole area is covered in antiseptic
and her breasts are injected with adrenalin
to help reduce post-operative bleeding.
I'm just re-opening the old scar
or the previous scar.
That's the implant that you can see just coming into view.
Wow! Look at that.
That is an 800 gram or 800 cc implant.
So almost a kilogram per breast.
You can imagine the effect that that's had on the skin.
It's just, you know, constantly stretching it over time,
making it thinner,
and the skin is paper, paper thin.
You can see my finger just through there.
Fifty-one minutes in and the old implants have been removed.
Now the process of rebuilding starts.
Patrick uses a sizer, a temporary implant,
to help decide what Jackie's new breast volume should be.
That's actually going to be a very natural result.
It's just under halfway smaller than she was.
I actually think that's going to be better for her.
With the size of her new breasts decided,
Patrick begins the process
of tightening the skin that has been stretched paper thin.
I'm not sure
that I've ever cut such thin skin.
I'm having to tread incredibly lightly here
to be able to preserve
the blood supply to the nipple
so we're taking the most superficial layer of skin we can here.
Her skin is temporarily stitched back together
so Patrick can check coverage.
Once he is confident with the augmentation,
it's time to remove the sizer
and insert Jackie's new smaller implant.
Excellent.
There we go, the finished article.
The process is then repeated on the right.
After three hours and 30 minutes,
Jackie now has pert breasts
that are half the size of her old rippled botched boobs.
I think it will make a big difference to Jackie.
She may well need a little bit of getting used to
in terms of the size
but this is not about size for Jackie.
It's about trying to get back to normality.
Six weeks after her operation,
and Jackie is back in London to see surgeon Patrick
for her final consultation.
Nice to see you as well.
Pop your things off and we'll have a little look.
Fabulous, yeah, wow!
They're healing really well, Jackie.
They're doing really, really nicely.
And just in terms of overall,
you know, proportion and shape,
they just look so much better, Jackie.
And they just kind of suit your physique and everything. Brilliant.
Gone are Jackie's oversized, rippled, ugly breasts
and in their place, a smaller, pert bust that is ripple-free.
By downsizing her implants
and re-tailoring her overstretched paper-thin skin,
Patrick has given Jackie a normal-looking bust again.
I know I'm more than half the size that I was before
but in my eyes, they just look really good.
It's really made a big difference to my life.
I feel better, I feel normal and just very happy.
Breast surgery is no longer just the preserve of women.
It's the third most popular reason for men to go under the knife.
Gynaecomastia is male breast enlargement
and it's extremely common for males
to have a degree of gynaecomastia
and, of course, at some stage that degree
becomes unaccepted and therefore they seek treatment.
Moob reduction surgery
can help to give a flatter, more masculine chest.
But 5% opting for the op end up disfigured and desperate.
Men like 51-year-old Paul White from Essex.
He thought getting rid of his would be easy.
One operation and he'd be moob free.
He was wrong.
It started when I was 15.
I was, obviously, going through puberty
and I was seriously ill with a kidney infection.
I think I'd put on a lot of weight, probably more than I should have done.
Before that I was quite active, doing canoeing and things,
but from that age,
I retained quite a bit of excess flesh around the chest area.
I got to the age of 29,
and I went to see about it, you know, could improvements be made?
And they said yes, and so I thought, well, OK,
I'm still young, got a lot of life ahead of me.
Let's go for it.
He booked himself in for an operation.
He's been left with a mangled badly scarred chest
with nipples that have folded over.
I went through all the procedure
and it was a little game really.
I don't know why he thought he had to take so much away.
But until you wake up, you don't know.
He had a second operation. It made things worse.
I'm just not confident going out in public anywhere.
If I wanted to go swimming, you know,
I'd be thinking are they looking at it? It looks awful in my mind.
It's psychological but...
it sort of bothers me.
Paul hates the way he looks
but after all he's been through, he is wary of further surgery.
Would an operation be successful?
Would I end up coming out perhaps worse than what it is?
Could there be more nipple damage? Could the nipple die?
You know, so I am conscious
that there's a lot more risks there as well.
Paul has travelled to London to see surgeon Paul Harris,
to see if his botched moob job can be repaired.
So if we work from the top down,
this side is a little bit full
so I want to do some liposuction over here
to try and match this sort of slightly more empty side over there.
Then we come into this area here, which is very empty,
and I need to fill up to about that region there, OK?
And then coming down to the nipple areas,
this is where we really want to try and get some fat into there,
to try and get some volume and lift this up and out.
They're quite deep indents, aren't they?
They are but I think, they're not tethered.
They're still quite mobile. Just lift your arm right up for me.
Yeah, you see that, that moves quite well,
so I think I'll be able to fill that out quite easily.
He's obviously upset and unhappy
with the outcome of his surgery
and that's why he's been very cautious and hasn't moved forward
with having anything corrected until now.
But I'm hopeful that we can address his concerns
and make some positive changes.
Still ahead, Marie's new body is revealed.
You look quite slimmer, don't you?
I mean, quite, quite a different person, quite a different shape.
And Paul goes under the knife for a third time.
You know before our eyes as it were, it's coming out more and more.
It's operation day for Paul White.
He's travelled to Hampshire for surgery at the Spire Clare Hospital
to repair his botched chest,
left following a moob job.
My expectations are not unrealistic.
I know it's never going to be perfect because the scars are there
but if I can get it so that it's not on my mind,
it will make a huge impact.
He's under the care of specialist cosmetic surgeon Paul Harris.
Paul has a problem, a mixed problem,
of having too much fat in some areas
particularly on the outside and the upper part of the chest,
and not enough fat under the nipple.
So I'm going to take down the areas where there's too much fat
and I'm going to inject into the areas where there's not enough fat.
Paul starts by injecting a mixture
of local anaesthetic and adrenalin.
He then starts the careful process of harvesting the fat.
It's important not to put this under very high pressure,
so there's just a little bit of pull on the syringe
and therefore the pressure doesn't damage the cells.
If the fat cells are damaged,
the procedure will fail and will need to be repeated.
Once harvested,
the solution separates into three parts.
There's fluid at the bottom,
there's the viable fat cells in the middle,
and dead oil at the top.
The oil at the top is from cells that have broken up and died,
and that's just the fluid from the local anaesthetic that I put in.
We're going to accelerate this settling
by putting it into the centrifuge machine
which will separate the layers out even more
and make them much more defined.
After two minutes in the centrifuge,
Paul discards the fluid and oil.
And then we've got viable fat cells
and stem cells in there.
By taking fat from here, I'm killing two birds with one stone.
I'm bringing this area down
and it's providing fat for the area there
so it's a double whammy!
Once enough fat has been harvested,
the process of reconstruction can begin.
So, the idea here is to
put in little tiny droplets of fat.
You know, before our eyes as it were,
it's coming out more and more.
Clearly there's been quite a lot of volume change here
and it's brought the nipple out
and compared to the non-operated on side as yet,
where this is still infolded and indented,
there's an obvious change.
I think it's going to improve Paul's confidence dramatically actually
and he understands this is not going to be the complete answer,
that he's making steps towards the end result
and I think he will be very happy with this early stage.
It's been nearly two weeks
since Paul had 38 syringes of fat pumped into his chest.
He's back in London to check on progress.
That looks good, doesn't it?
It's pretty amazing. If I'm honest,
I never expected it, for the first procedure,
to be as good as this.
So, your overall contour's much better, isn't it?
Your silhouette is much better, actually. It's good.
It's early days but after just one procedure,
Paul's chest is looking much better.
It's noticeably fuller and his nipples no longer fold over.
The fat transfer appears to be a resounding success.
It's amazing. I'd look in the mirror
and you'd just see what a difference it's made.
Paul will have to go under the knife again for more corrective surgery,
but he can look to the future with renewed positivity
that one day he will at last
be able to put his botched moob job behind him.
It's like a weight that you carry around with you for years and years and years,
sort of trying to hide it or feeling embarrassed about it,
and it's pretty amazing to look in the mirror
and, yeah, it's made a huge difference to me.
Paul has moved a step closer to having his disfigured chest repaired.
For Marie, the work to rid her of the excess skin
left following weight loss surgery continues.
In her first operation, surgeon Peter Arnstein
removed six kilos of skin from Marie's arms and abdomen,
as well as reshaping her sagging breasts.
Marie's surgery, though, came with increased risks of complications
and unluckily for her, an infection took hold
and the wound on her stomach burst open.
Peter took her back into surgery to clean and re-close the wound.
This T-junction here has opened up. It's gradually gaped.
It's kind of a half-healed wound
and it's one of the problems with very heavy people
because this huge weight of her flanks
is pulling that wound open.
When you're seeing holes in your body that aren't supposed to be there,
it's very scary.
As a result, the second operation
had to be postponed while she healed.
Six weeks have now passed
and with Peter happy that it's safe to proceed,
the next phase of Marie's transformation can take place.
What we're going to do today is to do some liposuction
for these large lumpy fatty areas
but also remove a big strip of skin
all the way down into her calf.
So now we check whether this point,
this cut will join up
with my proposed cut, this line here.
So I put that underneath and that over the top,
you can see they superimpose quite nicely
so I can be confident that they will stitch together quite well.
Happy that the wounds will close,
Peter and the team remove the excess skin.
She has so much surplus skin,
there is a limit to what one can take out
because there's also a question
of how much tension one can put on the wounds.
Too much, and Marie runs the risk of further complications.
You see, at the top end,
it's coming together quite nicely, quite shapely.
And as we go down, we're tailoring it
to give her the best result we possibly can.
After three hours,
Peter is happy he's removed as much skin as possible
and with the wounds now sutured closed,
Peter starts the liposuction to further recontour Marie's legs.
It's a very effective technique for localised lumps,
swellings and so on
but most of it is already done by the thigh-lift side of things.
After three and a half hours on the operating table,
the procedure is finished
and Marie once again starts the process of recovery.
Two days have passed since her operation
and Marie is still in hospital,
but this time the healing process is,
so far, complication-free.
I mean, if I take you at this level,
you look quite slimmer, don't you?
I mean, quite a different person, quite a different shape?
Marie's body has been transformed.
Gone are the pendulous folds of skin
that used to hang from her body
and her breasts have been returned to a more natural shape.
She will require further surgery
to remove the remaining excess skin
but the bulk of the work is behind her.
I can see a huge difference already.
To not see the folds of skin,
I finally feel like I can become the woman that I want to be.
I cannot be any more thankful and grateful
and appreciative than I am.
I am so overwhelmed and...
and just ready to take on the world now.
Next time,
the penis op that left a man with a permanent erection.
It's very embarrassing to walk around with an erection that won't go away.
A face full of infected filler.
My lips started to become really lumpy
and they started seeping pus.
And a mouth full of terrible teeth.
That's just awful.
It literally looks like a bomb's gone off in here.