Geordie Shore icon Sophie Kasaei haș opened up about her harrowing surgical experience, after a botched Brazilian butt lift left her just moments away from death.
The 35 year old reality star, who has always been open about her plastic surgery journey over the years, has undergone numerous procedures and tweakments in her quest to achieve the “perfect” body.
Yet while most of these procedures have gone without a hitch, it was her BBL procedure to enhance her derriere that almost cost Sophie her life.
The star flew to Turkey back in 2016 to undergo the BBL procedure after a clinic offered to perform it for free. With her self-esteem having take a hit, following four years of relentless trolling while in the public eye, Sophie thought the procedure would be a good way to regain her confidence and silence her critics.
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Broaching the subject last year, Sophie told The Sun what had lead up to the decision to undergo surgery, when she explained: “It's quite sad to think at the age of 24, I had these horrible insecurities that had been drilled into me from the press and public.
“I was just constantly being criticised, for being ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’, a ‘whale’, constantly ‘fat s**g’ and ‘embarrassing to society’, ‘giving Newcastle a bad name’, ‘pigs in wigs’, and they'd all say we look ‘like drag queens’. The list goes on and on and it's horrible.
“I was just growing up in this new world, I wasn't used to this industry. We didn't know what social media was, we didn't know what being in the public eye was.”
Yet deciding to undergo surgery was only the first hurdle, as the free clinic turned out to be a far cry from the celebrity experience she had expected, with the aftermath of her operation being likened to a “murder scene.”
However, in the most recent episode of the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast, Sophie has elaborated a little more on her experience while discussing the nightmare procedure with host Giovanna Fletcher.
"I got a BBL and nearly died. I basically had an abscess growing on my left bum cheek,” Sophie confessed.
"And it took over my whole body to the point where I was, I was (moments) away from them saying I was dead.
"It was horrendous. And I remember being in the hospital bed in South Shields Hospital and my family being there.And I just thought, 'This is this is probably my goodbye.’”
“And the doctor came in. They were like, 'We're going to have to rush into surgery right now.' And I was like, 'What is going on?'
"They said, 'If that abscess bursts inside your body, you were gonna (die)... basically.'"
Continuing Sophie said: “So I was like, I was like, 'All right.’”
Yet even the prospect of potential death wasn’t enough to silence the worries that were plaguing Sophie about her appearance, as she asked the doctor to try and make the scar as small and clean as possible, rather than merely focusing on her health.
“ I remember saying to the doctor, 'Whatever you do, if there's a scar, can you make it, like a really clean scar?’"
“I was still thinking about doing the magazines and what people think if I've got this massive scar. It was just such a. I was 24. I was ten years on now.”
What is a Brazilian Butt Lift?A Brazilian Butt Lift, or BBL procedure, is as a type of plastic surgery which is used to make buttocks bigger, more rounded or lifted.
In order to achieve this, surgeons insert silicone-filled implants and/or inject fat transferred from other parts of the body.
Yet while this may sound simple, the surgery itself is actually quite complex and carries with it a number of risks, ranging from severe bacterial infections including MRSA, necrosis - where tissue dies - scarring, wound ruptures and abscesses.
People have even died during BBLs due to fat being injected into large veins which then travels to the major organs.
But while the risks remain high, it still remains an increasingly popular procedure, with 1 20% year on year increase in demand seeing many people jet abroad to undergo the surgery, as BBL’s are not currently recommended in the UK.
Instead, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) recommends surgeons only carry out a procedure called superficial gluteal lipofilling (SGL).
This procedure uses fat collected from other parts of the body, but crucially this is only injected just below the skin, whereas a traditional BBL would see it inserted into the muscles instead.
It also recommends that the procedure be done under ultrasound guidance, to avoid injecting the fat into any large veins, a significant cause of death in BBL procedures.
