Last night Julie Hari (58) was awake. As she has been lying awake every night since February this year. Through grief. Anger. Because of all those questions. How could this happen?
Julie from Voorschoten had a very healthy daughter. Sharida. 39 years old. A cheerful woman, proud single mother of three. She loved to dance, she loved family. She recently started working in a hotel in Rockanje. But Sharida was also insecure. About her stomach, her buttocks.
Influenced by girlfriends
“She was actually always very happy with her figure, but all of a sudden that changed”, Julie tells RTL Nieuws. “I think she’s been influenced by friends. And maybe also by all those model photos you see on Instagram.”
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Sharida had been given the idea by a friend of having a tummy tuck, and a Brazilian butt lift, which gives you fuller buttocks with your own (belly) fat. “She didn’t have much money, so decided to have it done abroad. I was not happy with it, but she kept insisting that it was cheaper there.”
Mediation agency
At the beginning of this year, Sharida therefore approached a Dutch agency that mediates between patients and foreign cosmetic surgeons. Danichy Nobbe, owner of that agency, speaks to her. “I said she didn’t need it,” Nobbe says now, “and we didn’t have very good contact with the doctor we sent patients to at that time. So I advised against it.”
Nobbe doesn’t hear from Sharida anymore, so she thinks: she must have changed her mind.
Ticket to Turkey
But Sharida is a “decisive type,” says her mother. At the beginning of this year she books a ticket to Istanbul in Turkey on her own. On the way to a – in her eyes – more beautiful body.
Julie goes with her. “I couldn’t stop her and don’t let my child go abroad alone.”
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Severe complications
It Algemeen Dagblad spoke to patients this week who have been operated on in the Turkish hospital. They also talked about a lack of hygiene and severe complications after the operation.
The newspaper also spoke to the physician’s assistant in question. “Sharida’s death has shocked us.” According to the assistant, hygiene in the hospital is fine. “These are high-risk surgeries that can cause complications.” The doctor and the assistant have ‘just’ appointments with Dutch people in the agenda for the coming weeks.
When asked, Danichy Nobbe indicates that she has stopped her mediation agency and no longer works with the hospital and the doctor. She now wants to warn people: don’t go there anymore.
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On February 22, Sharida is checked for corona in the Turkish hospital, two days later the doctors operate on her. It takes them more than six hours, according to Julie. She then finds a dazed, corpse-pale daughter from the anesthesia and morphine. Sharida is in pain, can barely move. In the days after that, according to Julie, her situation does not improve.
Wounds were not clean
“The care was dramatically bad. I had to change her bed myself, empty her urine bag. There were just IV needles open and exposed next to Sharida’s bed. And that stench …” Julie pauses. “It is unpleasant to say about your own child, but she smelled all over her body. Those wounds were not clean and she had skin necrosis, her tissue died off because it was not properly cared for.”
“And those doctors kept saying,”It’s normal, it’s normal‘. Really, I can’t hear those words anymore. “
Stuffy
After a few days, Sharida gets short of breath. She’s sweating all over, she’s barely breathing, Julie unbuttoned her hospital shirt to give her more air, but it doesn’t help. “She turned all gray. I said, ‘I’m with you, hang on’.”
Sharida still says: ‘I love you, mom, take care of my children’. Then she falls away. “I screamed for help. Someone came after twenty minutes.”
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How dangerous is it?
Tummy tucks are ‘not a dangerous procedure’, says Berend van der Lei, former chairman of the Dutch Association for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery and professor of cosmetic plastic surgery at the University Medical Center in Groningen. “It will be only dangerous if there is also one butt lift met lipofilling is carried out.”
In addition, belly fat is injected into the buttocks. “There are several blood vessels in the buttocks. If the fat is injected too deep into a draining blood vessel, then this fat is transported to the lungs and eventually no more blood enters those lungs; this is a fat embolism. A large fat embolism in the lungs survives. a man not. “
It has often gone wrong, Van der Lei knows. In the time that Kim Kardashian became popular, became regular butt lifts carried out, with deadly consequences, for example in America. “The urgent medical advice now is: if you perform such an operation, do it superficially and make sure you are very experienced in this field.”
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They spend hours with Sharida, Julie has to wait in the hall. She sees her daughter back in the refrigerator in the evening. Sharida passed away.
“A movie. I didn’t believe it. I really didn’t believe it. I had to arrange everything, make a lot of phone calls, and a few days later I was on a plane in which my daughter was transported in a crate. How could that be ?!”
Sleepless nights
She still doesn’t believe it now, a few months later. She’s lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, or comforting her grandchildren, whom Julie now takes full-time care of. “They are 12, 14 and 9. They miss their mother. Sometimes they don’t have to go to school and I keep them at home when I can’t.”
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‘Cosmetic Travel’ Warning
There are good and bad doctors in every country, says professor Berend van der Lei. “The problem is that in countries such as Turkey things are often less well organized. In the Netherlands you get intake interviews, legal reflection time. This is often ignored in other countries.”
Van der Lei does not dare to say whether the doctor who operated on Sharida is punishable. “A doctor cannot be punished for complications, unless the doctor has acted incorrectly. But you have to be able to prove that. In the Netherlands, an investigation was immediately started in the case of Sharida. But in Turkey? I doubt it.”
Catharina Meijer, cosmetic doctor and chairman of the Dutch Cosmetic Medicine Association, warns against ‘cosmetic travel’. “We have little insight into how it is regulated in other countries, and it is not the first time that we hear that quite heavy things happen during cosmetic procedures. It is also relatively common in Turkey.”
Meijer also has her doubts at the employment agencies. “They often have no medical knowledge, but do carry out a consultation and then refer a patient – and then also abroad. That does not sound very reliable.”
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The grief is fresh, says Julie. What’s also fresh: the anger. “We got a death certificate: she would have died of a pulmonary embolism. Whatever it was, I think mistakes were made. During the surgery by that doctor, and after that, by the nurses.”
“You know what I want? I want an excuse. And not only that. I want an investigation, I want that doctor to be punished and that there is better hygiene and aftercare in that hospital. I keep asking myself: what went on? wrong? How could this happen? “
‘I have to fight’
Julie and her brother-in-law are now looking to hire a lawyer. They talk to journalists, they look for other victims of this doctor, they contact the hospital, spoke to the lady of the mediation office.
“I’m not mourning yet, no dude, I don’t get around to that at all. I have three children to take care of and I have to fight. I’m so terribly angry. My grandchildren don’t have a mother anymore. Everything is broken, and you didn’t have to. “
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