A criminal case has been launched against Russian plastic surgeons who are accused of leaving a woman with a gaping hole in her buttock and her nipples ‘in the wrong place’.
Veleslava Grigorieva, 40, said the pain was so bad after spending £25,000 to improve her looks that she needed ‘to book three seats on a plane because I can’t sit down for more than a few minutes’.
The distraught woman today welcomed the criminal case decision which could see the senior surgeons at Nudelman Cosmetology and Plastic Surgery Clinic in Ekaterinburg jailed for up to six years if convicted of damaging her health.
She had gone public with intimate pictures of her ‘plastic surgery from hell’ to force legal action from the authorities – which is now announced.
But in the process she was subject to vilification and humiliation from those who criticised her decision to use plastic surgery to regain her beauty, she said.
She claims the initial ‘botched surgery’ by Igor Tsvetkov, trained partly in Canada and Sweden, left her nipples ‘too high and in the wrong place’ with ‘ugly scars’ and required corrective surgery which failed to solve the problem.
Veleslava returned to the clinic where another surgeon Nikolay Golubkov, agreed to do a new operation on her breasts and suggested she should ‘improve my buttocks’, she claimed.
She was given new liposuction and ‘lipo-lifting’ – when the buttocks are enlarged with the help of patient’s own fat removed from other parts of the body.
But after weeks of appalling pain she was told by a medic at another clinic she had an abscess in one buttock but they did not want to get the blame and ‘refused to help’.
Eventually, she had to fly to Moscow to a new clinic where doctors ‘removed much of my buttock’.
Nightmare pictures showed the damage to her rear.
Russian Investigative Committee official Alexander Shulga said the criminal case was being launched under accusing the clinic and its surgeons of failing ‘to meet safety requirements’ in carrying out plastic surgery.
The woman said: ‘I still struggle with the consequences of these surgeries.
‘All this affected not only my physical health, but also all aspects of my life.
‘Firstly, it is a lot of stress, and secondly, material damage, because I lost my job and sold an expensive car in order to (pay for corrective surgery).
Speaking of her ordeal, she said: ‘I am not a public person, but I had to put my history on public display in order to help myself and attract the attention of other people to the problem related to the quality of the work of the plastic surgeons.
‘Of course, many people wrote me nasty things saying I am guilty, since I lay down under the knife in pursuit of beauty.
‘Please understand, it is strange to go to a plastic surgeon when you are 18, but when you are 40 – there is nothing wrong with the desire to improve yourself, especially if there are problems in appearance.
‘I always kept myself in shape, and went to the gym.
‘I didn’t want implants in my breasts or a bum like Jennifer Lopez… But I had complexes and certain drawbacks.
‘And when the doctor suggested – I trusted him and decided to go for it.’