A woman who attended her friend’s Botox party was left in terrible pains and lips twice the normal size after getting injected by former prisoners who had no medical training.
29-year-old Rachael Knappier attended the party, which took place at her friend’s home, in hopes of getting her forehead wrinkles erased and enjoy some good time with her friends.
After a few glasses of wine, however, the women convinced Rachael to get lip fillers. What no one expected, however, was that the ‘beautician’ would accidentally inject the filler into her artery and cause massive swelling which nearly cost the 29-year-old her lip.
“My friend had raved about this beautician and how great she was so I decided to go ahead,” Rachael recalled, saying she let herself get influenced by her friend due to the booze.
“There were fizz and cake and it was a bit of a conveyor belt with girls sitting in the kitchen waiting their turn with local anaesthetic cream on their faces,” the law firm worker, who paid nearly $300 for the procedure, said.
“The beautician – who I assumed at the time was a nurse – didn’t ask me to sign any consent forms so alarm bells should have rung. But being at a party with friends took away all the seriousness of having filler injected into my face.
“She noticed the bump on my lip when she was doing my Botox and said she could inject a bit of filler for me if I wanted her to. To be fair, she told me to go and have a think about it in the kitchen but she’d found my weakness. My lip is the one thing that really bothers me about my appearance.
“One injection upwards towards my nose was very painful. Within a few hours I began to feel unwell, my lips swelled like nothing I’d ever seen before and the pressure was unbearable.”
Struck with pain, Rachael decided to contact the beautician who appeared to be just as shocked by the incident as she was.
“She was visibly shocked, clamped her hands over her mouth, told me I was having an allergic reaction and that I needed to take antihistamine and get to A&E.
“At A&E they tested me for anaphylactic shock but three medics concluded I wasn’t having an allergic reaction and told me to go back to the beautician for treatment to dissolve the fillers,” she said, adding how she discovered that the beautician was an ex-con with no medical training after her ordeal.
“The owner told me I needed to get to London immediately and that she’d have an emergency doctor waiting for me.
“She said that, based on looking at my pictures, her medical team suspected vascular occlusion, meaning that the filler had been injected into an artery and could lead to necrosis – the death of soft tissue. I honestly thought I was going to die.”
Within 72 hours after the emergency dissolving treatment, the swelling finally began to wear off.
“It was so painful, that my mum, who was sitting upstairs in a waiting room, could hear my screams. I would never go near a Botox party again. I’m cross that I didn’t do my research and just assumed that everyone who injects Botox and fillers has been to medical school.
“I could have had the same reaction to the filler with a doctor but the difference is that they would have known what to do to treat it,” the 29-year-old expressed.
As the founder of Safety in Beauty campaign, Antonia Mariconda said after she was approached by Rachael, “we urge ladies to please do their research and only entrust these invasive aesthetic procedures to experienced medical professionals.
“We are calling for the government to ban non-healthcare professionals from carrying out these seriously risky procedures and met with Theresa May earlier this year. It’s time to clean out the cosmetic cowboys.”
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