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Courteney Smith, a mother of two, was miraculously brought back to life after dying on an operating table in a Turkish cosmetic surgery clinic while undergoing a Brazilian butt lift procedure, or BBL.
And now, she’s warning others of the potentially deadly dangers of the booty-boosting makeover.
“It was the biggest mistake of my life,” Smith, 25, told Kennedy News. The operation, which she opted for in August 2020, left her with severe scarring and lifelong heart issues. “I wish I never did it.”
Smith, from Hertfordshire, England, traveled to Turkey for the BBL — a procedure in which physicians extract excess fat from certain areas of the body and transfer it into the buttocks — after finding the clinic on social media.
But, immediately after arriving at the Turkish hospital for surgery, things took a turn for the worse.
“It was literally like, as soon as they took the money from me, everything changed,” said Smith. “It was just all so unprofessional. I don’t think they know what they’re doing.”
Rather than having a pre-op meeting with doctors to discuss her body goals, Smith claims the surgeon arbitrarily took matters into his own hand.
“I was meant to [have] a consultation. But I was told that, because the clinic wasn’t open that early, the doctor was literally just going to come in and draw on me and that was it,” said the stay-at-home mom.
“The surgeon didn’t even ask me how I wanted it to look or if I had any pictures to refer to. He just said, ‘All the English girls like to have the hourglass figure,’” said Smith, who added she only wanted a “small amount” of fat added to the top of her bottom.
But, immediately after waking up from the five-hour operation — a process that she was allegedly told would only take three hours — Smith knew something had gone terribly awry.
“When I woke up from surgery I was lying on my bum,” she said. “Obviously, you’re not meant to be lying on your bum when you’ve just had BBL surgery, you’re supposed to be on your front.”
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Her questionable positioning aside, the British brunette’s body was tortuously afflicted with bolts of excruciating pain.
“The pain was 1,000 times worse than childbirth without pain relief. It was unbearable,” she recalled. “I literally thought I was dying.”
And the physical torment only worsened when health-care attendants attempted to remove her surgical garb.
“As they were taking the garment off me, I was screaming and crying because I was in so much pain,” said Smith. “My bum looked like I’d had a skin graft — it was red raw.”
Following the surgery, Smith was transported to the clinic’s nearby post-op recovery villa, where she was meant to convalesce for seven days; however, she was shocked to find that there weren’t any medical professionals on site.
“They don’t have doctors at the villa where you stay. There’s just one admin person who sits on a computer in the front room,” Smith revealed.
“The next day, I was lying on my front like you’re supposed to after the surgery, but I was struggling to breathe and had pain in my chest,” she added. “When I looked at my chest I had a massive lump and bruise.”
But villa staffers gave her a flimsy excuse for the unsightly contusion.
“I questioned them about why [the bruise] was there, and they basically said it was because of the liposuction,” said Smith of the fat-extraction portion of the BBL process. “But the liposuction should stop underneath your boobs.”
Owing to the pain, just one day after the surgery, Smith struggled back to the hospital to demand answers from the doctors.
“I had to make my way in a taxi to the clinic the day after surgery because I was in so much pain,” she remembered. “And the doctor just looked at me and said, ‘You’re fine, you can go.’”
After four days in the recovery villa, perturbed by the facility’s wanton “lack of care” for its patients, Smith returned to England. Once home, she immediately sought medical attention from her primary physician for her lingering and intense chest pains.
“When I got back to the UK I went to the doctor, and they said that the bruise is from being resuscitated,” she said. “That was really scary to hear. I never had any problems with my heart before so I wasn’t expecting them to say that.”
After undergoing a string of tests, Smith’s doctors determined that she now suffers from Brugada syndrome — a condition that affects the way electrical signals pass through the heart and can cause the heart to beat dangerously fast.
She notified the Turkish clinic of her condition, and Smith claims the employees confirmed that her heart did indeed stop beating during surgery and that they had to resuscitate her before it was too late.
And, as if sustaining a post-op chronic heart issue wasn’t bad enough, Smith said her BBL results left her with stinging disappointments.
“I wasn’t even left with the results I wanted,” she groaned. “They left me with a fold in my stomach where they took too much fat across the belly button area, which made the top part fold over.”
She added, “If I lean to the side and stretch my skin out you can see there’s two lumps [that] are painful — it feels like my skin is literally going to pop.”
And the discomfort is more than skin deep.
“I also get these pains in my bum still, and it feels like there’s fat sitting on the nerves that shouldn’t be there,” said Smith.
As a peace offering, she claims the doctors from the Turkish clinic agreed to amend their shabby work.
“When I told them [about my post-op troubles], they seemed quite panicked and asked me to come back in for a revision surgery for free,” Smith said. “But I just said to them, with all the problems that I’ve had, I would not come back and have another surgery with them. They just said: ‘That’s all we can do for you.’”
Four months after her BBL nightmare, Smith became pregnant. Her doctors in the UK wanted to continue testing the wellness of her newly fragile heart, but they postponed the reagents until after the birth of her baby, in September 2021.
And when she delivered the baby, a girl, Smith was forced to give birth without any pain medication, owing to concerns that the drugs might trigger a cardiac arrest.
She is currently undergoing further testing to confirm her diagnosis.
Unsurprisingly, Smith now vows to never again submit to elective plastic surgery, and fears that even the slightest intervention might do fatal damage to her feeble heart.
“I had a healthy heart prior to this surgery,” she said. “But now, I wouldn’t even have a local anesthetic because I’m worried that if I get put to sleep I won’t wake up.”
Smith strongly advises that folks resist the allure of the bodacious BBL beast.
“I would never recommend the surgery to anyone. It’s too risky knowing you could possibly die, to then not even get the results you wanted at the end of it.”
