A 20-year-old British woman who underwent a string of cosmetic procedures in Turkey says she nearly died after contracting a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection.
Isabella Crawford, a make-up artist from Newcastle, secretly flew to Turkey in February after getting in touch with a popular plastic surgeon who recommended she have a ‘mummy makeover’ – which included a tummy tuck, a breast uplift, a Brazilian butt lift and a liposuction, despite not having any children.
Speaking to ITV, Isabella said she was low on confidence and wanted to ‘try to fix how I felt’ after having been swayed by numerous online ads she received for cosmetic surgery abroad.
‘It wasn’t about an image I was trying to achieve, I just felt so bad inside’, she said.
‘I thought going somewhere like that would make me happy, because on social media that’s what they tell you’.
20-year-old makeup artist Isabella Crawford from Newcastle said she suffered from complications after undergoing cosmetic surgery in Turkey earlier this year
Isabella says she woke to find that she had been left disfigured from a botched surgery
Isabella recalled waking up from her procedure to surgical wounds
After getting in touch with the unnamed surgeon, she said he recommended ‘quite a bit of surgery for a 20-year-old girl to receive’.
‘I just told myself, he knows what he’s doing’, adding that ‘I was just really naive and trusted him’.
Isabella was put to sleep at 9am and was not returned to her room until the early evening.
‘I don’t know where I went, who touched us, or what happened.’
But Isabella woke to find that she had been left disfigured from a botched surgery.
She recalled waking up to surgical wounds and various bags attached to her body which were filling up with blood.
‘I was black and blue’, she said, adding that she felt like ‘an experiment to see how far the body can be pushed’.
Only a few days after her surgery, Isabella flew back to the UK, but said she spent the entirety of the flight in the toilet as blood and liquid poured out of her open wounds.
‘I thought, I’m going to die on this flight’, she said.
Once she made it home, Isabella’s mother, who thought she had been away on a girls’ trip, rushed her to the hospital, where she was treated for a rare flesh-eating bacteria and severe open wounds.
‘The nurses on the ward couldn’t believe anyone would perform that amount of surgery at once,’ Isabella recalled.
‘I was black and blue’, she said, adding that she felt like ‘an experiment to see how far the body can be pushed’
Isabella had various bags attached to her body which were filling up with blood
But despite wanting to change her appearance, Isabella now regrets pushing to extremes to ‘feel better about myself’.
‘Please don’t fall for it. There’s so much more to life than being beautiful’, a teary Isabella said.
Her story comes just after it was reported yesterday that a British woman is currently trapped in Turkey after suffering from serious complications from botches cosmetic procedures, including two bouts of sepsis.
28-year-old mother of one Cennet Lo flew to Bodrum in April to receive a tummy tuck, liposuction and Brazilian butt lift.
Four months later, however, she remains in Turkey in recovery after her cosmetic procedures went catastrophically wrong.
Since she first went under the knife a few months ago, Lo has had to undergo four major surgeries to remove skin infections.
But even the corrective surgeries have caused Lo distress.
Isabella now regrets pushing to extremes to ‘feel better about myself’
She claimed that after contracting sepsis for the second time, she went into surgery to close the open wound, but woke up to find out her surgeon had given her a whole new tummy tuck without her consent.
She also recalled how she had dead tissue removed from a wound without any anaesthetic.
The number of complications from cosmetic surgeries in Turkey have been on the rise, as procedures like these tend to cost significantly less than in some Western countries.
According to the Foreign Office, 28 Brits have died after having cosmetic surgery in Turkey since 2019.
Meanwhile, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), those needing hospital treatment in the UK after cosmetic surgery abroad has shot up 94 per cent in three years — from 57 in 2020 to 111 in 2022, with 124 cases so far this year — with procedures carried out in Turkey accounting for more than three-quarters of those in the past six months alone.
