The Tragedy of Cosmetic Surgery

The Tragedy of Cosmetic Surgery

Many women suffer from inferiority complex regarding their looks or physique. They have problems with different parts of their bodies and crave for what they perceive to be better forms of those parts. Some hate the way they look generally, while others are offended by their faces, noses, lips, brows and even eyes or are ashamed of them. Another group of women endowed with small breasts would rather have them big, while those with moderate buttocks prefer big ones.

This dissatisfaction with their natural endowments has pushed many women into undergoing plastic surgeries of all kinds to recreate themselves, as it were. It’s amazing what those women do to change their looks. It’s actually bizarre, crazy and unjustifiable. Aside from bleaching of black skins to become white or light-complexioned, we have nose jobs in which some women get their noses pointed after the order of late Michael Jackson. The surgery involves removing cartilage from the ears and fixing it to the nose to give it the desired shape. Some women go for face lifts in which doctors extract fat from the face and cut off the excess skin that results, then, stitch the wound.

Some also go for lip jobs to increase or reduce the size of their lips. They receive injections on the lips to increase or decrease them as they desire. Jaw lift is another cosmetic surgery that women undergo. It brings out the jaws, and this, according to those women, boosts their confidence! And then we have the brow lift, in which the doctors drill their patients’ skin on the brow and temple and then stitch it, pulling the chromic along to lift the brows higher on their faces!

There is also hip enlargement, and this surgery involves extracting fat from other parts of the body and pumping it into the hip area to make it larger. The boob’s job involves enlarging small breasts by fixing implants of different sizes into them. The implants are expected to last for five or ten years, and the sizes range from A to G. Each size is further categorised small or big, so you have Big A, Small A, Big B, Small B and so on, depending on the preference of the woman. Breast augmentation is the plastic surgery in which saggy breasts are pumped up to become firm and attractive.

The Brazilian butt augmentation is for those with flat butts who want them enlarged. And then, the stomach-shrinking operation involves having a gastric band fitted around the stomach to make it smaller, or having fat extracted from it and cutting off the excess skin. Tummy tuck is another form of stomach-shrinking operation whereby the doctors cut off the bulging part of the tummy and stitch the wound. There is also the weight-loss surgery called bariatric surgery, which involves having a silicon band fitted around the stomach, or staples inserted into it to make it smaller. The doctors sometimes do a gastric bypass in a weight-loss surgery. In this case, they re-plumb the patient’s gut to make the stomach smaller and the digestive tract shorter. This surgery is aimed at reducing patients’ appetite for food.

These are some of the cosmetic surgeries that women undergo in a desperate bid to achieve their desired looks. The Dr. 90210 programme on DSTV Channel 124 E! shows these operations live, and they are scary, to say the least. When you watch women’s breast tissues being removed and implants being fixed into their breasts, you cannot but wonder why those women would go that far in the name of beautification. Some even go for Multiple Reconstruction Surgery which involves more than one procedure of changing multiple parts of the body.

These surgeries may sound easy and perfect, but the truth is that they are not as easy and perfect as they sound. Apart from the pains the women suffer in the process of healing, the surgeries result in complications. Research conducted in the United Kingdom points to long-term health problems including bone thinning, fractures, anemia, kidney stones and psychological problems which lead to suicide, besides the effects of depression and anxiety in the first few weeks after the operation. A report by researchers from the University of California, San Diego shows that weight-loss surgeries are failing, as a significant number of patients regain much of their weight within a few years of surgery.

Another study by Dutch doctors has also found that the success rate of gastric banding is so low that it calls to question whether the operation is worth doing at all. Five years after surgery, a third of the patients failed to lose significant weight; after 10 years, two-thirds were around their original sizes, and as a result of complications, a third of them needed the operations re-done after 5 years, while half needed this at 10 years.

Series of deaths have been recorded in the past few years in the UK and US as a result of bariatric surgery. They include 30-year-old Kerry Greaves from York who suffered complications from a gastric band procedure and died a month later, despite doctors operating 14 times to try to save her life! Her stomach was leaking bile and she died from organ failure. Greaves’ mother, Anne, thereafter counselled: “My advice to anybody thinking of having this operation would be: “Have more pride in yourself and don’t do it”.

Moreover, Anne Truesdale, aged 42, was said to have died from blood poisoning after a stomach-stapling operation. A leak resulted in a number of complications over nine months, leading to her death. 59-year-old Susan Wrighton also died after a surgeon failed to spot internal bleeding following a stomach-stapling operation at a private hospital in Macclesfield. The mother of two had to return to the theatre three times before doctors discovered she was bleeding from the surgery site!

And lest you think that these cosmetic surgeries are the exclusive preserve of foreign women, let me state here that Nigerian women are very much involved. Some have been travelling abroad to have the surgeries, and now, the clinics are available in Nigeria where women are having fun recreating themselves. The surgeries have practically enslaved women, who are obsessed with their looks and desire to look better or different.

One Lisa Cookson, a 33-year-old nurse from Preston, Lancashire, had a gastric band for which she paid 8,000 pounds, but her weight remained the same. Her surgeons made several attempts to adjust the band, but none worked. In frustration, Lisa said: “It was a waste of 8,000 pounds. The doctors have just said that sometimes, the operation does not work. If I had been told more about the risk of failure, I might have saved myself the money and the misery”.

The doctors won’t tell you about the risks because they want your money at all costs. The lesson in Lisa’s story is that doctors are not God, and God is sovereign. He proved His sovereignty to Lisa and her fellow travellers who thought doctors had the power to recreate them as they wished.

As I said earlier, these surgeries are not restricted to foreign women. In October 2005, former Nigerian first lady, Mrs. Stella Obasanjo, died on the operating table in an exclusive Spanish hospital during a stomach-shrinking surgery. The surgeon involved in the procedure was jailed for one year in 2009 by a Malaga Court in Spain. And many of those breasts that Nigerian women parade in their indecent dressing are actually boobs that have been pumped up by cosmetic surgeons. They are not natural breasts and the women are so excited about the seeming success of their misadventure that they want to show them off to everyone.

Women should learn to accept themselves the way they are. Except in unfortunate cases where people’s faces or other parts of the body are badly damaged as in motor accidents or acid baths, and body malformations, etc., cosmetic surgeries are not necessary, more so that they are so deadly. They should be avoided by anyone who desires to live long. Before you rush to the cosmetic surgeon to change that part of your body that you hate so much, think about the risks and remember Greaves’ mother’s advice when her daughter died in the process of doing what you are about to do: “Have pride in yourself and don’t do it”. Then eat right and exercise regularly to help lose weight if your weight makes you uncomfortable.

By Nike Oluwole.

(First published on July 15, 2010)