As Chloe Roiser lay in agony on the floor of an Airbnb, bloodied and bandaged, having been discharged from a hospital in Turkey, her teenage daughter wept and pleaded: ‘Mum, please don’t die.’
It was a heartbreaking scene and all the more painful for Chloe to recall, given she was a trained nurse and the reason she was in this life-threatening state, fighting a deadly infection, was not an accident or an emergency, but ‘pure vanity’.
Feeling self-conscious about her ‘deflated’ cleavage after breastfeeding four children, in April she’d opted to have a breast uplift and implants at a clinic in Antalya, southern Turkey.
But four months later, Chloe was still recovering from the serious complications post-surgery that resulted in a deadly flesh-eating infection. In total she spent six long weeks trapped in Turkey, costing £12,500. She has also lost half her left nipple.
In fact, she made two trips to the Antalya clinic. A week after the op, Chloe came home to Wymondham in Norfolk – but then became ‘very unwell’ with fever and pain. When her breast began oozing discharge in early June, she made an emergency dash back to Turkey – accompanied by her partner and autistic daughter, Maisie, 13, as she was too weak to walk unaided or carry her own bag – for medical treatment.
Chloe says she didn’t want to burden the NHS with the fall-out from cosmetic surgery in another country – but she also feared doctors here would simply take the implant out and hoped, by returning to Turkey, she could save it.
On three separate occasions, the surgeon, who had performed the original operation, cleared the infection and the necrotised skin on her breast using a scalpel – meaning she lost half her left nipple.
But then, instead of being kept in a sterile environment for monitoring, she was told to go back to her Airbnb, which is where she eventually collapsed.
Feeling self-conscious about her ‘deflated’ cleavage after breastfeeding four children, in April Chloe opted to have a breast uplift and implants at a clinic in Antalya, southern Turkey
A week after the op, Chloe came home to Wymondham in Norfolk – but then became ‘very unwell’ with fever and pain. When her breast began oozing discharge in early June, she made an emergency dash back to Turkey
‘That moment, after Maisie found me on the floor, when she was crying and clinging on to my hand, will haunt me forever,’ Chloe tells me having finally returned to the UK after what turned out to be a three-month nightmare. ‘She should never have had to witness her mother bleeding and broken like that, but I’m ashamed to say she did.
‘I was too weak to give her the reassurance she desperately needed and all I could think was: “I could die. What the hell have I done?”’
Chloe is among an estimated 150,000 Britons who travel to Turkey each year for cut-price cosmetic procedures, having discovered that a breast uplift and size D implants would cost around £3,500 – half the price it would have set her back here.
‘I’m a nurse so I know all too well how deadly an untreated infection and necrosis can be,’ says Chloe, 31, of the chain of events which followed the surgery. ‘The thought of dying and leaving my children without a mum, just so I could bear to look at myself undressed in a mirror and go swimming again – neither of which I’d had the confidence to do for years – is just unbearable.
‘Everyone, friends, my mum, warned me not to go to Turkey for the surgery – so many knew people with horror stories – but I spent a year researching it and honestly thought, given my medical knowledge and training, I’d be safe.
‘Now I’ve lost half my left nipple to necrosis – at one point it looked like I would lose my whole breast – and I’ve no idea how bad it’s going to look once the scars finally heal.’
Her appearance is no longer her priority, however. ‘Feeling confident about my breasts seemed so important to me a few months ago, but having nearly died, I now couldn’t care less how they look. The important thing, for me and my family, is that I’m alive.’
When booking her cut-price surgery, what Chloe hadn’t taken into account was the lack of aftercare. This meant that she returned home having had a three-day course of antibiotics, but with no follow-up appointments to check on her wounds.
The area around her nipples was swollen and the skin was sore and blackening, while discharge leaking from the surgical wound smelt putrid – all of which she knew indicated infection
On seeing her breasts, her aunt, an experienced beautician, confirmed Chloe’s worst fears: she had necrosis in her left nipple
In those post-op weeks, she was in a lot of pain. She had bought strong painkilling medication from a Turkish pharmacy before she left but, having never had surgery before, Chloe says she didn’t realise how disproportionate her pain really was, nor that it was actually a sign of infection.
Drains and steri-strips had been removed from the incisions before she left Turkey, but her breasts were then covered with micropore tape, designed to help the wounds heal as well as reduce scarring. It meant she couldn’t see what was happening to the flesh beneath.
With four children – as well as Maisie, she has three sons aged 10, nine and seven, who stayed with family and friends while she was in Turkey – to take care of, and with a sense that the discomfort was self-inflicted, she struggled on.
However, when the time came for Chloe to remove the tape, at the end of May, she saw the edges of her left nipple, in which she had no sensation, were red raw and raised.
‘I’d followed all the aftercare. I have a nursing degree – I’m not silly, I know what I’m doing – and did all the redressing with the kit they gave me.
‘But I knew this wasn’t right, so I contacted the clinic and they told me to just keep applying antibiotic ointment.’
However, by early June Chloe felt very unwell, feverish and in so much pain she couldn’t move her arms.
The area around her nipples was swollen and the skin was sore and blackening, while discharge leaking from the surgical wound smelt putrid – all of which she knew indicated infection.
Worried about becoming one of the many who drain the NHS each year, Chloe ignored her family’s pleas to go to A&E
When asked what she would say to anyone else considering going to Turkey for cosmetic surgery, Chloe has a simple message: ‘Don’t do it!’
On seeing her breasts, her aunt, an experienced beautician, confirmed Chloe’s worst fears: she had necrosis in her left nipple. It needed urgent treatment or she could lose it. Indeed, her entire breast was at risk.
Worried about becoming one of the many who drain the NHS each year, by turning up at hospitals needing corrective surgery after undergoing treatments in Turkey, Chloe ignored her family’s pleas to go to A&E.
‘I thought the doctors would be annoyed with me for going abroad for cheap surgery then dumping the ensuing problem at their door,’ she says. ‘I’ve heard colleagues complaining about this, so would have felt really ashamed.
‘Of course, I knew they would do what was needed to save my life but thought that would also probably entail removing the implant, leaving me with very lopsided breasts, whereas, if I could get back to Turkey, I might get to keep it.’
Chloe’s concerns about being a burden on our creaking NHS appear legitimate. The total cost of addressing complications from cosmetic procedures – the majority of which are the result of surgeries abroad – is estimated to be an astonishing £110million, according to a report in the Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, earlier this year.
So, after a video call with her surgeon in Turkey, who confirmed that the area around her stitches did appear infected, Chloe booked a flight back to Antalya.
On June 4, she returned to the clinic where she’d had the surgery and doctors performed the first of three procedures to remove dead tissue from her breast.
‘No sedation was provided, only local anaesthetic, so I was fully awake and in horrific pain throughout,’ recalls Chloe, whose only other foray into cosmetic treatments was having lip fillers two years ago. ‘It was incredibly traumatic.’
She was given IV and oral antibiotics, which she had to pay £20 for, and the wound was left open until she returned to the clinic the following day. Despite ongoing signs of infection, it was then stitched up.
In an attempt to reduce spending on hotels, Chloe had booked a room in someone’s house on Airbnb ‘with poor hygiene and no air conditioning’, and this is where she now returned. Over the next couple of days, Chloe’s breast became swollen and inflamed, with increased levels of discharge, and she again developed a fever.
The clinic told her to come back on June 8, when a second surgery was performed, more infected breast tissue removed and IV antibiotics administered.
Doctors acknowledged that the infection was entrenched and yet she was sent back to the Airbnb and collapsed later that evening.
‘I was dizzy, faint, shaking, and physically unable to stand,’ recalls Chloe. ‘I was scared to go to sleep in case I didn’t wake up so just dozed, fretfully, upright in bed.’
Chloe spent the next three weeks in constant pain, in blood-soaked bandages and with a raging temperature.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the infection flared again and, on June 30 – by which time her partner had had to return home for work, leaving daughter Maisie as sole carer for her mum, helping her wash and doing their laundry in a sink – she returned to the clinic for a third surgery.
‘This time the surgeon warned me I could lose my breast completely and suffer permanent nerve damage,’ she recalls. ‘The toll this ordeal was taking on me, physically and emotionally, was so great I completely broke down afterwards.
‘I was too dizzy to stand, in lots of pain and barely had the energy to put one foot in front of the other, and still they sent me back to the Airbnb, with no medic checking on me that night or the following day.
‘I was treated as an outpatient for something that should have been managed in hospital, with round-the-clock IV antibiotics, fluids, and observations.
‘If that had happened, I feel sure they could have got rid of the infection much sooner.’
As things turned out, Chloe booked, and had to cancel, five sets of flights home over the six weeks, losing hundreds of pounds when the clinic told her she was not fit to fly.
Finally, on July 18, having been issued with a ‘fit to fly’ note, Chloe took a four-and-a-half-hour flight back to London.
Maisie, who is autistic and, according to Chloe, couldn’t have coped at home without her, had by then missed six weeks of school.
While Chloe acknowledges that this was a significant price for her daughter to pay for her choices, she says the school was understanding and that Maisie is diligent, so studied while they were away.
It is only thanks to the support of friends and family, who have helped out both practically and financially, that Chloe was able to survive this ordeal.
‘I owe my family and friends, who dipped into their savings to support me, so much money,’ she says. ‘I’m determined to pay it back but I don’t know how long it will be until I’m fit to work again.
‘It’s not just the physical toll but the emotional toll this has taken on me. I’ve been left feeling so anxious I’m constantly on the verge of a panic attack.’
Last week, Chloe relented and gave into her concerned family’s pleading to seek medical advice here.
A visit to A&E resulted in a referral to a breast surgeon who performed an ultrasound scan.
‘He said, tissue-wise, my breast looks OK, which is a relief, but they’re not going to know how much nipple and breast skin I’ve lost to necrosis until the scars have healed.’
A follow-up NHS appointment has been made, for six months’ time, when the longer-term effects should be clearer.
So what, I wonder, would Chloe say to anyone else considering going to Turkey for cosmetic surgery?
‘Do not do it!’ she almost yells. ‘I know problems can arise after any surgery but, at least if you have it done here, you can access the follow-up care you need.
‘I know people reading this will probably wonder why on earth a woman with a nursing degree would go to Turkey for a boob job, and I do get it.
‘But the clinic I went to had lots of positive testimonials online. Just four days after surgery, they stuck a camera in my face and asked me to talk about how well it had gone, too, so now I question their validity.
‘Testimonials should be recorded six months down the line, when patients really know how it’s gone.’
Chloe says that, since April, she has learned another hard lesson about her generation’s love of cosmetic procedures – aided and abetted by social media influencers.
‘If we feel insecure, we decide that what will help is Botox, a boob job or a bum lift,’ she says. ‘In fact, we’d be better off focusing on the mental health issues underlying these insecurities.
‘I thought all I needed to cure my low self-esteem was breast surgery, but now I feel even worse, and my anxiety is through the roof.’
Horrific though the past three months have been for Chloe, now that she’s finally back home with her family she is counting her blessings.
‘Going to Turkey for cosmetic surgery has been a nightmare from which I thought I’d never wake up,’ she says.
‘But I’m very lucky I didn’t lose my whole breast or, far worse, develop sepsis and die, leaving my precious kids without their mum.’
