14 DAY TRIAL // Plastic surgery has opened many doors for man, first and foremost in medical terms, with doctors now being able to offer all kinds of help to burn victims, to name just one instance. However, plastic surgery is also widely used on aesthetic considerations, sometimes with the most disastrous or near-disastrous consequences.
This is the angle that Channel 5’s Botched Up Bodies series uses. In the first episode of the new season, which aired last night, viewers were introduced to the case of a woman who almost went blind because of vanity.
Shenise Farrell, a student from London, had heard of an intervention through which, by the insertion of implants similar to contact lenses in the eye, she could change her eye color and go from dark brown to light brown.
She was so desperate to have the procedure that she stopped to listen to no one’s advice, the Daily Mail reports. Neither was she discouraged by the fact that she had to travel all the way to Central America, to Panama, to have it done.
The price tag was no obstacle either so, packing her suitcase, she also included an £8,000 ($13,137 / €9,662) check to pay for it and she was on her way.
“I was so determined to get the surgery nothing rang alarm bells for me – nothing obvious,” she says in the first episode of the series.
What should have been a huge alarm bell for her was arriving at the clinic and being told that they could not give her light brown eyes because they were out of stock. Instead, she gladly accepted to have blue implants put in.
The second alarm bell was when the doctor told her not to scream during the intervention because “it could cause things to go wrong.” She did scream, and she believes this is what caused things to go wrong because, once the doctor was done, she had very blurry vision.
However, Shenise was easily appeased when the doctor told her that this was normal and that vision should be back 100% after a few hours. By the time she got back to London, she was still not seeing well – and things were about to get even more complicated.
Shenise went to a London hospital, where she was told she would have to go under the knife again to have the implants removed. With this second intervention, she was risking to go permanently blind, but she knew she had no other choice at this point.
Only after 3 months after the second surgery did Shenise recover her eyesight. It was a lesson learned the hard way, but she promises it was learned.
“Now that my eyes are back to normal, my eyes are brown but it doesn’t matter what shade of brown it is. The main thing is that I can see,” she says.