Danniella Westbrook vows to pay back £500k NHS fees for her surgery after suffering ‘nightmare’ operation in Turkey
DANNIELLA Westbrook has vowed to pay the NHS’s £500k fees for her surgery after suffering a ‘nightmare’ operation in Turkey.
The former EastEnders star, 49, recently revealed a rogue doctor slapped her and operated on her face without anaesthetic in a terrifying ordeal.
Danniella had been hoping to undergo facial reconstruction in Turkey after years of battling Osteoporosis and a collapsed nasal septum due to her previous cocaine addiction.
But now she’s back to square one, having been previously offered half a million pounds worth of corrective surgery on the NHS.
While the former Celebrity Big Brother star turned down the treatment in favour of going abroad, she’s now reverting to Plan A – but this time she’s promised to foot the bill herself.
She told The Sun in an exclusive chat: “I was doing it in Liverpool with a professor there. I should have stayed with him but a friend convinced me to go to Turkey. It’s my own stupid fault.
“I’m going back to him though but I’m gonna pay for it this time. I’d been quoted £500,000 before, I don’t care what it is.
“If I don’t have it done, the palate in the back of my mouth will collapse and I’ll suffocate to death.
“When I went to Turkey, I could have died. I could have died if someone had just botched it any further. I’m not the youngest person in the world and I haven’t been the wellest.”
Danniella – whose wounds have been stitched up with non-dissolvable fishing wire – detailed the horrific incident which saw her on the brink of self-harming.
She claimed the doc inserted metal rods into her face without her permission, which nearly poked through her top lip, before shouting expletives and taking her phone away when she tried to film the shocking scenes.
Danniella, who insisted she didn’t fly to Turkey for a cheaper option, had been meeting with the dangerous doctor for three months over Zoom before she got on the plane in April.
She told how the miscommunication began after she underwent 3D scans on her nose, explaining how the surgeon called the corrective operation “impossible” due to her bone density from Osteoporosis.
After being offered some filler and Botox to straighten her nose, Danniella accepted and returned to see the surgeon later on – but claimed she hadn’t been told about a thread lift by that point, a cosmetic procedure used to sculpt the face.
She described a scene in an office block, a room with the TV on and a dentist’s chair in the centre. She told how a 20-something girl rolled out some blue paper and removed utentils – including unsanitised scalpels and cotton wool balls – from an artist’s pot.
When the assistant started injecting her foot for a UV drip, Danniella knew something was wrong, and soon afterwards the surgeon lasered an incision into the side of her head, in an area where anasthesia had not been administered.
She said: “I’m sat there going, ‘Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing? I can feel that.’ F*****g hell it was painful, a hot laser through my skin.”
Danniella was reassured the surgeon had performed the procedure five times that day, however she began to panic when his colleague clamped her face.
The TV personality continued: “She’s standing at the end of my chair, she can tell. I was like, ‘Listen I’ve explained to you before that I have a lot of scar tissue, a lot of trauma. I feel a lot of pain. I can feel a lot. I thought I was having filler, what’s going on?’
“So I’m screaming, I’m sitting there, but out of shock I’m crying. He’s got three metal rods and put them into my face.
“He was going to me, ‘Stop crying, stop crying.’ I said, ‘I’m in a lot of pain. Please, please. I’m frightened. I’m in a lot of pain. I didn’t know this was going to happen.’ It was really frightening.”
Danniella, who’s had a pleasant thread lift experience before, said the ordeal went from bad to worse when the doctor inserted the rod so close down to her top lip, it almost pierced through.
When she continued to alert the surgeon to her intense pain, he began swearing at her aggressively, telling her, “Stop f*****g moving, I tell you, stop moving.”
She alleged, “He’s gone behind me, grabbed my face, he’s gone, ‘Stop f*****g moving,’ and slapped me on the other side of the face. I switched. I went, ‘Who the f**k are you slapping?'”
Danniella said he threw all the blood-drench tools onto the table and stormed out of the room with rods and tubes hanging out of her face, removing his scrubs.
After his assistant withdrew the equipment from her skin, she began sewing her head up with fishing wire which, two months on, Danniella has to trim every day, despite believing they were dissolvable coils.
Danniella – who woke up the next day with a black eye from being slapped – said she was sent home with no antibiotics and lost all sight in her right eye for an hour due to air pressure after flying back home to Portugal.
She said: “I was s**tting myself but I just wanted to get in my bed. I’d gone through all of this trauma to then suddenly sitting here on my own right the way back to where I was 21 years ago… before I got clean and sober the first time.
“Sitting there thinking about cutting myself and burying myself. What the f**k has this done to me? I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I feel so alone.'”
While the clinic found her another surgeon two days later, where she received a pain-free thread lift and liposuction, with fat transferred to her face, she’s had to pull out of a Belfast film shoot this summer as her skull still needs corrective surgery.