Danniella Westbrook regrets going under the knife for her fifth facelift.
Danniella Westbrook thought she was going to die after fifth facelift
The 49-year-old actress - who is best known for playing the role of Sam Mitchell on BBC soap opera 'EastEnders' for various stints over the years - has undergone several bouts of surgery reconstructive surgery on her nose to replace her eroded septum following excessive cocaine use and recently travelled to Turkey to have a fat transfer in a bid to fix a past botched op, but has now told of the "living nightmare" that the trip became.
She told OK! Magazine: "I had a surgical thread lift where they put over 1,200 threads into my face. They were also supposed to reconstruct my nose, which is what I went there for, but they haven’t done that. They put 200 threads in my nose to straighten it, but it hasn’t worked. So I feel like I’ve wasted my time. The main thing I wanted doing was for my nose to be reconstructed. I’ve been waiting for nearly four years. So I’m going back to my surgeon in Liverpool to get my nose fixed. They’re going to rebuild all the bridge in my mouth and build up the front of my nose. I need to wait to heal first, but I’ll be getting it done when I can.
"I also had fat harvesting [a fat transfer]. They’ve taken the fat out of my back, my sides and my stomach, and put it into my face to make it more symmetrical. But I feel like they’ve taken too much fat from my stomach. I’ve always had a six-pack, and I’ve woken up, and I’ve lost it.
"I also have big lumps of fluid all over my belly. They’re like big tennis balls. It’s ruined my body. It’s going to take a lot of work to get it back to how I was. I’m 50 this year, and I wanted to be in the best shape ever.
"The whole thing has been awful, if I’m being honest!"
The former 'Celebrity Big Brother' star went on to add that her face ended up "three times its size" following the operation and decided to write a will after hearing "horror stories" about people who had gone through the same thing and believed at one point she was going to die.
She added: "I’ve had a lot of surgery in my life, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. The pain was off the scale.
“My face was three times its size. I had fluid under my eyes, they were so swollen.
I could barely open them. I have never been in pain like it. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was hysterically crying every single day. It was terrifying because I don’t speak Turkish, so nobody could understand me. I was trying to tell them how much pain I was in and they just couldn’t understand, so I was freaking out.
"I thought I was going to die during the surgery, I really did. On the way there, I was told horror stories about people dying on the table. Not at the clinic I was at, but at others in Turkey. So that really frightened me.
“I wrote a will before the surgery, not that I’ve got much to leave, but I was petrified. My dad has got dementia, and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing out here?’ If anything happened to me, he wouldn’t understand."
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