A British woman who went to Turkey for a series of cosmetic operations was left with serious infection and sepsis – and claims she ‘woke up mid surgery’.
Mum-of-two Cennet Lo, 28, is stuck in Bodrum months after flying out for a tummy tuck, liposuction and a Brazilian butt lift.
In an interview with ITV, she recalled ‘waking up and putting my head up and seeing liposuction being performed on my stomach’.
After flying back to the UK, Cennet started experiencing increasing pain, which led her to visit hospital on two different occasions.
‘I was scared to go to sleep because I actually thought I was going to die,’ she said.
Despite this, she flew back to Turkey in May to receive corrective surgeries.
As a result, Cennet has undergone four major surgeries to intervene on skin infections.
She claimed that after contracting sepsis for the second time, she underwent surgery to treat the open wound, but woke up to find out her surgeon had performed another tummy tuck, which she hadn’t agreed to.
Among the horrific anecdotes related to experience, the Cennet also recalls having necrotic tissue removed from a wound without any anaesthetic.
‘He started cutting at my stomach with no local anaesthetic, no pain relief, no nothing. They had to hold my legs down, I had a woman holding my shoulders down,’ she told ITV News.
‘There’s been days I’ve been in so much pain I’ve not wanted to be here,’ she continued.
More than 1.2 million foreigners visited Turkey for medical procedures in 2022, the vast majority cosmetic. The proportion of Britons among them is growing faster than any other nationality, with an estimated 150,000 travelling there to have ‘work done’.
Complications from procedures are also on the rise, with the Foreign Office saying at least 28 Brits have died after having cosmetic surgery in Turkey since 2019.
According to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), the number of people requiring hospital treatment in the UK after cosmetic surgery abroad has skyrocketed to 94 per cent in three years.
BAAPS president Marc Pacifico said: ‘One of the fundamentals of plastic surgery best practice is whether you are doing the right operation on the right person at the right time.’
‘We were hearing things like tummy tucks on morbidly obese wheelchair-bound diabetics who should never be remotely considered for surgery. There were also many absolutely dreadful stories of aftercare — or lack of it.’
