They say beauty hurts, but it’s not supposed to hurt as much as it does for 49-year-old Elaine Foo, who is left with discolored scars and searing pain after an invasive surgery to lengthen her legs.
Foo says she believes she has long suffered from body dysmorphia, a mental condition that causes the patient to obsess over a perceived physical deficiency to an extreme degree. The classic examples of body dysmorphia include anorexia (driven by the false perception of being fat), and the rare cases of people who believe they should have been born without a limb.
It all began for Foo when she paid $64,000 to a London surgeon to lengthen her leg bones sufficiently to take her from a height of 5’ 2” to 5’ 5”. Foo said she had always ruminated about her height, first because she was taller than other girls until the teenage years, when, suddenly, most other girls overtook her in height.
The surgery involved breaking the bones in the leg and attaching metal implements to slowly stretch the bones over a several-month period. During that time, the bones are supposed to knit back together. Surgeons warn that the recovery period is not short, and it is no picnic.
Surgeon Hamish Simpson said it takes at least “double” the initial stretching period to recover “reasonable function,” and that patients should expect to take a whole year out of their lives.
When Foo woke up from the surgery, she said initially everything felt great. Then the pain started, which she described as feeling as though she was being roasted from the inside. She screamed in pain until she fell asleep exhausted in the early morning.
That was just the start. Foo said that while she was performing the leg movements necessary to engage the stretching device, she hear and awful crunch as was in unbearable pain. X rays showed that a nail had broken through one of her bones. Not only that, but the bone that was supposed to heal had not put itself back together, leaving her femur attached to nothing but a small metal clip.
Foo sued the surgeon, and recently entered a settlement for a “substantial sum” that has not been disclosed. The man who operated on her, Dr. Jean-Marc Guichet, denies any negligence. He said the unfortunate side effects were made clear to Foo before the procedure.
