Implants That Change Your Life

Today I want to share, in my own words, the testimony a Venezuelan woman sent me about her breast enlargement surgery with PIP implants. She asked me not to reveal her identity because of the great shame she feels, but she believes it is necessary to tell her story so that other women can see what she has been through.

At 27, after having her second child and breastfeeding him for more than six months, she felt it was time to get back the size and figure she had before she married. It was the era of television shows about cosmetic surgery, where celebrities even advised selling your TV set if necessary to pay for an operation, and she admits she watched that “junk” day and night. Anxious to look stunning, and seeing the natural physical effects of motherhood (which at the time seemed to her like the end of the world), she convinced herself that no diet or exercise would ever make her look as perfect as she wanted.

She went to a cosmetic center in a well-known Caracas clinic that offered the best prices, where a friend had been operated on and said it had changed her life. The director, a supposed plastic surgeon under forty, agreed to remove her little tummy. But as she was getting dressed he looked at her chest with contempt and asked, “And the breasts?” Until that moment her small breasts had never bothered her, but in front of this “beauty specialist” she felt tiny, miserable and ugly. Ashamed, she let him “evaluate a solution,” which turned into a quote. She went home feeling “humiliated by her reality,” convinced her husband of the “need” for surgery, and they spent almost all of their annual bonus on liposuction and implants.

Two weeks later she was in the operating room: a tiny office where a woman (or a teenager) went in every half hour, like a market where the order is dispatched as fast as possible. While she waited, she heard with horror the screams of pain of the patient who had just come out, and the assistant told her that was “just how it is.” She handed over to those unscrupulous hands all her insecurities, fears and vulnerability, hoping the scalpel would change her life for the better.

She woke up gasping, in terrible pain that was soon joined by emotional pain. When the bandages came off she felt like a stranger to herself, as if she were wearing a heavy, uncomfortable mask. In eight years she never again felt comfortable with her body. She lost sensation where the implants had been inserted, and the pain became a constant companion, especially in the days before her period, when it left her practically incapacitated. Her check-ups always came back “normal,” and she wanted the implants removed but had no money. Over those years she came to understand that her appearance does not determine her happiness or her well-being, and that she had despised and mistreated the body God had given her.

Then, during a check-up in October, a swollen lymph node led to cancer screening, which revealed that one implant had ruptured. Days later the PIP implant scandal broke. She ran to the doctor who had operated on her, only to learn that he was not a plastic surgeon at all and had left the country more than two years earlier. Other patients of his confirmed that he had used PIP implants. She is now on a social security waiting list to have them removed, without replacement, and lives with the discomfort and the anxiety of not knowing what may happen in the meantime.

She closes by saying that when a woman becomes a mother she becomes a mother to all the children in the world, and that she shares her story in a desperate attempt to spare her daughter and every other woman the physical and spiritual pain she has suffered. She asks God to have mercy on her and on the arrogance of wanting to “fix” the gift He gave her with such love 34 years ago, and she says that today she knows she does not need a perfect figure, only life and health to appreciate fully what she has been given.