L.A. socialite's cosmetic surgery gone wrong
Ah yes, the things we do for beauty. We’ve all heard some of the horror stories on cosmetic surgery gone bad – Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers, I could go on- but this story about an L.A. socialite really takes the cake.
Ah yes, the things we do for beauty. We've all heard some of the horror stories on cosmetic surgery gone bad – Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers, I could go on- but this story about an L.A. socialite really takes the cake.
A woman in her late sixties went to her doctor complaining of severe eye pain and noted that every time she forced her eyelid open, she heard a strange clicking sound. Her doctor at The Morrow Institute in Rancho Mirage, Calif., took one look at her swollen right eye and knew something was wrong.
Six and a half hours of surgery later, the socialite's doctor and his colleagues had removed countless small pieces of bone fragments from the woman's eyelid. Yes, you read that right, take a minute to process it – Bone. Growing. In. Eyelid. Those clicking sounds she heard – the pieces of bone rubbing together every time she tried to open her eye!
The doctors later found out that a few months before she came to them, she had a face-lift that made use of her own adult stem cells, a relatively new cosmetic procedure. In her case, the docs used a type of stem cell that can transform into virtually any tissue – bone cartilage or fat, among others—and injected those cells around her eyes.
The culprit here though, was that during the procedure, the docs also injected some dermal filler – which is routine for plastic surgeons – but the main component of this one was calcium hydroxylapatite, a mineral that biologists use to turn stem cells into bone. And she paid them $20,000 for that? Bottom line ladies: you're not the only one getting older, so think twice before trying that new experimental beauty treatment – it's experimental for a reason!
Check out the full story at Scientific American.