HOUSTON – It's happened to women in Houston, New York and Miami.
“There were times I felt like a monster,” victim Rajee Narinesingh said.
Across the country, women have been given illegal cosmetic injections. Some of the people responsible have gone to jail for organizing the treatments. Some of the patients have died from complications.
The danger is popping up so frequently, the Food and Drug Administration started a campaign to "check before you inject.”
Sugar Land's Dr. Malik Kutty, of Luxe Plastic Surgery, said he's seen cases of people in Houston conning women to inject saline, fix-a-flat or other dangerous substances into their bodies to get big implants at a small cost.
“They don't realize that things should be monitored, that you have to make sure somebody's blood pressure doesn't drop or they have a heart attack in the middle of it,” Kutty said. “Unfortunately, plastic surgery in general has become such a kind of internet, TV, celebrity kind of thing that patients don't think of it as a serious medical procedure anymore.”
Some patients are now facing ugly consequences.
It happened to one Houston woman who wants to hide her identity. She said the people who performed her surgery are still out there and she fears they may retaliate against her for speaking out.
“The bottle said silicone on it from what I remember,” she said. “The first session was, I paid probably around $1,000 and I was told after the procedure was done that I might leak some of the silicone out so they put superglue over the actual puncture wounds.”
She said the procedure was done inside a hotel room. About six months later, she started noticing problems and went to Kutty to reverse the complications.
“Whenever I sit down, there's a sense of hardness that I feel. I can also notice dimpling, little marks in my legs where it's traveled down my leg,” the woman said.
Kutty said there's only so much he can do.
“The problem becomes when that material migrates and because it's in an area that's not completely separated from the rest of your body, it can actually kind of slide its way down the leg,” he said.
The foreign material could potentially kill someone, depending on where it travels, and doctors typically cannot correct these problems because they don't know what's been injected.
Kutty is trying to help as many of the patients as he can.
“They're not dumb people. They're actually just average people that have normal jobs, families. They're responsible people and they get caught up in this kind of this whole celebrity, ‘Hey, these are easy things to do [idea].' Once they've done it, there's actually a lot of kind of embarrassment about the fact that they did it,” Kutty explained. “I feel so bad for these women because I could totally understand that you don't know and something happens to you and it's an embarrassing thing, then they just tried to live with it.”
It's normal for implants to cost thousands of dollars at a doctor's office. A house or a hotel are not safe places to have these procedures done. Never trust someone who offers cheaper services there and always verify a plastic surgeon before the procedure by clicking here and checking for their certification.
