I underwent gastric sleeve surgery in Turkey and now I have to eat through a feeding tube
A WOMAN who raised more than £2,000 for gastric sleeve surgery in Turkey has been left eating through a tube after the op was botched.
Pink Jolley, 45, was desperate to lose some weight after hitting 17st 11lbs when she was confined to a wheelchair due to a medical issue.
Pinky, from The Wirral, Merseyside, managed to raise £2,100 on a GoFundMe page to travel to Istanbul for a sleeve gastrectomy in November 2022.
The treatment works by removing a large part of the stomach and sealing up what’s left to create, in effect, a new, much smaller stomach.
It means that patients feel full sooner and cannot eat as much, often leading to significant weight loss.
However, in Pinky’s case, the two-hour operation, which removed 85% of her stomach, left her fighting for her life.
And Pinky, who is currently unemployed and suffers from diabetes, said she was terrified she would die after the experience overseas.
And she said she became concerned that the staff at the surgery “could barely speak English” but felt she had to go ahead with the operation to help her lose weight.
After it was done, she experienced complications including vomiting and abdominal pain.
She recalled: “It felt like someone was stabbing my stomach constantly.
“The only pain medication that was offered was paracetamol which barely helped with the pain.
“I demanded blood tests because I had never felt pain like this before.”
‘ORGANS TURNED TO CONCRETE’
Upon returning to The Wirral four days later, her local GP advised her to go to hospital, where a scan revealed that a serious leak after surgery had led to an infection.
Her doctors said that the bug had turned her organs “to concrete”.
In January, three surgeons Arrow Park Hospital had to “jet-wash” her stomach to save her life, before she was transferred to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.
There, she battled sepsis for over a month, before returning home in late February.
Pinky said: “I feel misled and upset that something that was meant to help has caused me so much suffering.
“I’ve lost four stone in four weeks because my stomach is tiny.
“I wanted to lose eight stone within two years.”
What is the difference between a gastric band, bypass and sleeve?
When coupled with exercise and a healthy diet, weight loss surgery has been found to be effective in dramatically reducing a patient’s excess body fat.
Recent research in the United States found that people with gastric bands lose around half of their excess body weight.
Meanwhile gastric bypasses reduce this excess body weight by two thirds post-op.
However, it’s not always successful – and patients still need to take responsibility for eating well and working out.
The three most widely used types of weight loss surgery are:
- Gastric band: where a band is used to reduce the stomach’s size, meaning you will feel full after eating a reduced amount of food
- Gastric bypass: where your digestive system is re-routed past stomach, so you digest less food and it takes less to make you feel full
- Sleeve gastrectomy: where some of the stomach is removed, to reduce the amount of food required to make you feel full
She has not been able to eat solid food since November and has been left with a gaping hole in her stomach.
The furious patient added: “They totally botched the operation and left my insides so infected they were all hard and like concrete the doctors said.
“I did nine months of research and wished they had performed a leak test.
“No one should have to go through this pain.
“I’ve lost so much weight, but this isn’t how I wanted it to happen.
“Looking back it was so cheap that I really should have thought twice but I just got so swept up. After nearly dying I just wish I never got a gastric sleeve.”
However, she was grateful for all the support she received from husband and full-time carer Paul, 43, and said she was “thankful” for all the help she received from doctors back home.