A WOMAN who travelled to Turkey for weight loss surgery has been left in such “excruciating” pain she requires morphine six times a day.
Pinky Jolley, in her 40s, is also unable to eat so is fed through a tube after the “botched” procedure “turned her organs to concrete”.
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She visited Istanbul for a gastric sleeve in November 2022 after hitting 17st 11lbs while in a wheelchair.
Pinky paid £2,100 for the operation, which sees a large part of the stomach removed and usually costs between £8,000 and £10,000 in the UK.
It means patients feel fuller sooner and cannot eat as much, often leading to significant weight loss.
But the two-hour surgery, which removed 85 per cent of Pinky’s stomach, left her fighting for her life.
She told the BBC: “Within moments of waking up, the pain was excruciating.
“I just knew that something wasn’t right.”
Pinky, from The Wirral, Merseyside, then started vomiting and she was terrified she was going to die.
“It felt like someone was stabbing my stomach constantly,” she said.
“The only pain medication that was offered was paracetamol which barely helped with the pain.
“I demanded blood tests because I had never felt pain like this before.”
Pinky, who has diabetes, returned home four days later and immediately made an appointment with her GP.
She was advised to go to hospital, where scans revealed a serious leak had led to an infection and “turned her organs to concrete”.
In January, three surgeons at Arrowe Park Hospital had to “jet-wash” her stomach to save her life.
She was then transferred to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, where she battled sepsis (a life-threatening reaction to an infection) for over a month before returning home in late February.
In total, she spent three months on intravenous antibiotics, had eight CT scans, six endoscopies and one major operation.
The NHS has had to spend an estimated £100,000 on Pinky’s care after her cut-price op abroad, according to surgeon Rishi Singhal.
The doctor, from Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham who has treated three patients with complications from surgery in Turkey in the last month, added that any procedure to improve her condition is potentially life-threatening because of the extent of the damage to her insides.
No one should have to go through this pain.
Pinky Jolley
Pinky said: “I feel misled and upset that something that was meant to help has caused me so much suffering.
“I’ve lost four stone in four weeks because my stomach is tiny.
“I wanted to lose eight stone within two years.”
Pinky has been unable to eat solid food for 14 months, relying on being fed through a tube.
“They totally botched the operation and left my insides so infected they were all hard and like concrete, the doctors said,” Pinky, who needs morphine six times a day, added.
“I did nine months of research and wished they had performed a leak test. No one should have to go through this pain.
“I’ve lost so much weight, but this isn’t how I wanted it to happen.
“Looking back, it was so cheap that I really should have thought twice but I just got so swept up.
“After nearly dying I just wish I never got a gastric sleeve.”
A surgeon’s warning
Bariatric surgery is offered in a number of European countries at a fraction of the cost of going private in the UK.
Procedures often include gastric bands, sleeves or bypasses – for which there are long waiting lists in Britain.
But when aftercare goes horribly wrong, the NHS is often forced to take over.
Professor Omar Khan, consultant bariatric surgeon at Ashtead Hospital in Surrey, fears people are risking their lives just to shed some pounds.
He told WalesOnline: “The key issue with any form of surgery is safety.
“For patients travelling abroad for weight loss surgery, there may be real question marks over the quality of pre-operative assessment and the lack of follow-up care offered to these patients.
“Rare, but serious complications can occur and tend to make themselves known one to two weeks after surgery.”
Risks include blood clots and the gut becoming blocked or narrowed.
“Anyone post-surgery must be able to be reviewed and treated by their surgeon, especially in the event of complications,” Prof Khan added.
“Not only this, but these patients do require long-term follow-up, and someone to coordinate their care in the longer term – all things that are absent in patients undergoing surgery abroad.
“When asked about the risks posed with cutting costs and having weight loss surgery abroad, I like to use the analogy about car insurance: buying a car without insurance might be cheaper, but it’s not safe.”
Pinky did, however, add that she was grateful for the support from her husband and full-time carer Paul, and from doctors in the UK.
She, Mr Singhal and other medical experts are now calling for better regulation of bariatric surgery overseas as rising numbers of patients require urgent medical care when they return home.
“Seven to eight years ago, I used to see one complication from Turkey every six weeks, now I am seeing one a week,” Mr Singhal said.
He blames long NHS waiting lists, Covid lockdowns and the rising cost of living for the surge in “obesity tourism”.
Treatment in Turkey can be 75 per cent cheaper than private operations in Britain but it is not regulated in the same way.
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Types of weight loss surgery
When coupled with exercise and a healthy diet, weight loss surgery has been found to be effective in dramatically reducing a patient’s excess body fat.
Recent research in the United States found that people with gastric bands lose around half of their excess body weight.
Meanwhile, gastric bypasses reduce this excess body weight by two thirds post-op.
However, it’s not always successful – and patients still need to take responsibility for eating well and working out.
The three most widely used types of weight loss surgery are:
- Gastric band: where a band is used to reduce the stomach’s size, meaning you will feel full after eating a reduced amount of food
- Gastric bypass: where your digestive system is rerouted past stomach, so you digest less food and it takes less to make you feel full
- Sleeve gastrectomy: where some of the stomach is removed to reduce the amount of food required to make you feel full