Traumatised Danniella Westbrook reveals surgery hell after doc SLAPPED her and operated on face without anaesthetic
DANNIELLA Westbrook has revealed she was left screaming in agony after a surgeon sliced open her face without administering anaesthesic before slapping her when she begged him to stop.
The former EastEnders star, 49, had been hoping to undergo facial reconstruction in Turkey after years of battling Osteoporosis and a collapsed septum due to her previous cocaine addiction.
But she's been left traumatised by her experience with a rogue doctor, in an ordeal which she claimed could have killed her.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, 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.
She is now desperate to pay the £500k bill to fix her crumbling face herself after being warned the palate in the back of her mouth will collapse and she will suffocate to death if she doesn't act quickly.
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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.
The former Celebrity Big Brother housemate 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.
She said: "I'm sitting there in tears. I'm saying to him, 'Without being rude to you, you understand what I'm saying... I've got myself in such a state about this. I've waited five years, I've spent only the last week thinking, "Wow, I'm going to be different next week."
"But his girlfriend runs the PR side of the company. They wanted me to do something. They'd got me out there and they wanted the press. They'd been promised to be on the TV."
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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.
Danniella said: "I've already flown out there. I mean, I didn't think they were going to start opening me up. They were all talking in Turkish earlier on and they just said I can do filler and Botox.
"Anyway, she starts putting injections in my foot. I said, 'What are you doing?' She said, 'I'm going to give you a UV drip in your foot. You're going to have a vitamin drip.'
"Anyway, so I'm sitting with my head back. She pours iodine on my hair. I thought, 'Well, this is a new revelation for Botox and filler.' They normally get a little black Biro, but she shaved the side of my hair.
"He walks in, in his blue outfit like I'm having a cesarean injection and she just says, 'Oh I'll put three injections in here, here and here to numb me.' This is like having a tattoo painkiller but I didn't think they were opening me up.
"As soon as she put them in one side of my face and before she could walk over to the other, he's picked a little tube off from the side, nowhere near where she shaved my head or did the injection, and lasered this big f*****g thing on the side.
"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.
"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?'
"She took my phone off me cos I was filming. It's informative, I was gonna do a YouTube thing.
"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.
The former I'm A Celebrity star said continued: "He never came back into the room, never saw him again. The girl stitched it up and then said, 'You can go now.' I couldn't speak. Did that really happen?
"The thing I was there for was my nose and my mouth, for proper surgery. I've got my gums receding back. Eventually I'm going to suffocate. I don't need a thread lift, this is not cosmetic, I need a medical procedure."
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.
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She has also moved back to her native Britain so she can be supported by her loved ones, but refuses to tell her jailbird fiance David, 29, the extent of her agony as she fears it will "drive him mental".
She concluded, "I can't do the film anymore. I can't go on telly looking like this. I don't feel happy looking like this. I hate looking at myself in the mirror, I hate it. Hate everything. It's not fair."