Danniella Westbrook promises to pay back £500,000 in NHS fees for her surgery after suffering a ‘nightmare’ in Turkey
DANNIELLA Westbrook has vowed to pay the NHS’ £500,000 fees for her surgery after suffering a ‘nightmare’ operation in Turkey.
The former EastEnders star, 49, recently revealed a rogue doctor had slapped her and operated on her face without anesthetic in a horrifying ordeal.
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Danniella had hoped to have facial reconstruction in Turkey after years of battling osteoporosis and a collapsed nasal septum from her past cocaine addiction.
But now she’s back to square one, having previously been offered half a million pound corrective surgery by the NHS.
While the former ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ star turned down the offer in favor of going abroad, she’s now getting back to Plan A – but this time she’s promised to foot the bill herself.
She told The Sun in an exclusive chat: “I did 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 will return to him, but this time I will pay for it. I’ve been quoted £500,000 before, I don’t care what it is.”
“If I don’t get it done, the roof of my mouth will collapse in the back of my mouth and I’ll choke.”
“When I went to Turkey, I could have died. I could have died if someone screwed it up any further. I’m not the youngest person in the world, nor was I the wealthiest.”
Danniella – whose wounds were stitched up with non-dissolvable fishing wire – detailed the horrific incident in which she came close to harming herself.
She claimed the doctor stuck metal rods in her face without her permission, almost stabbing her upper lip, before she yelled profanity and took her phone away as she tried to film the shocking scenes.
Danniella, who insisted on not flying to Turkey because of a cheaper option, had met with the dangerous doctor via Zoom for three months before boarding the plane in April.
She shared how the miscommunication began after she underwent 3D scans of her nose, explaining that the surgeon called the corrective surgery “impossible” because of her bone density due to osteoporosis.
After being offered some filler and Botox to straighten her nose, Danniella accepted and later went back to the surgeon – but claimed she hadn’t been told about a thread lift, a cosmetic face-sculpting procedure, at the time.
She described a scene in an office building, a room with the TV on and a dentist’s chair in the middle. She recounted how a 20-year-old girl unrolled blue paper and retrieved paraphernalia – including unsanitized scalpels and cotton balls – from an artist’s pot.
When the assistant started injecting a UV drop into her foot, Danniella knew something was wrong, and shortly thereafter, the surgeon used a laser to make an incision in the side of her head, in a spot where anesthesia would not be given had been.
She said: “I’m sitting there and I’m like, ‘Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing? I can feel that.’ Damn it was painful, a hot laser through my skin.
Danniella was reassured that the surgeon had performed the procedure five times that day, but panicked when his colleague grabbed her face.
The TV personality continued, “She’s at the end of my chair, it shows. I was like, ‘Listen, I explained to you before that I have a lot of scar tissue, a lot of trauma. I feel a lot.’ from pain. I can feel a lot. I thought I had fillers, what’s up?’
“So I scream, I’m sitting there, but I’m crying from the shock. He has three metal bars and put them in my face.”
“He said to me, ‘Stop crying, stop crying.’ I said, “I’m in a lot of pain. Please please. I’m afraid. I am in great pain. I didn’t know that was going to happen.” It was really scary.
Danniella, who previously had a pleasant thread lift experience, said the ordeal was made worse when the doctor inserted the wand so close to her upper lip that it almost penetrated.
As she continued to alert the surgeon to her severe pain, he began aggressively berating her, telling her, “Stop moving, I’m telling you, stop moving.”
She claimed, “He went behind me, grabbed my face, he went, ‘Stop moving’ and punched me on the other side of the face. I have changed. I said, ‘Who the hell?’ *k, are you slapping?’”
Danniella said he threw all the blood-soaked tools on the table and stormed out of the room with batons and hoses sticking out of her face to take off his gowns.
After his assistant pulled the gear from her skin, she began sewing her head up with fishing wire, which Danniella has to cut off every day two months later, though she believes the coils are dissolvable.
Danniella, who woke up the next day with a black eye from a slap, said she was sent home without antibiotics and lost her right eye completely blind for an hour after flying back to Portugal due to air pressure.
She said: “I tied my ass but I just wanted to get in my bed. I had been through all this trauma until all of a sudden I was sitting here alone, right where I was 21 years ago… before I got clean and sober for the first time.
“I’m sitting there thinking about cutting and burying myself. What the hell did that do to me? I’m sitting there and I’m like, ‘I feel so alone.’”
While the clinic referred her to another surgeon two days later, where she performed a painless thread lift and liposuction, transferring fat to her face, she had to pull out of a film shoot in Belfast this summer as her skull still needs corrective surgery .
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