I hated that flat back in the mirror
I’m Mia. I’m twenty-nine and I live in London. My waist went wide and my bottom was flat, like a board. I lifted whatever they put in front of me. The curve did not arrive. Jeans marked nothing behind. Dresses hung on me as if they were still on the hanger. I have spent years trying to make peace with that and I never quite managed it.
Moving my own fat to where it was missing always sounded logical. What stopped me was the news. Women who didn’t wake up. Fat in the bloodstream. I also had the other pictures in my head: a bum so huge it looked like a nappy, or so stuck-on it looked like an ant. And the quieter one: six months later, the fat gone, the pain for nothing. Then I got the quotes here. Both were more than I could get my hands on. So I started reading about Turkey. Some of it was women in jeans who finally had a shape. Some of it was hard lumps, and recovery done alone in a hotel. The question I kept coming back to was is a BBL in Turkey safe? Not is it cheap. Is it safe. I wanted a clinic name next to a hospital name, not a gallery with no address.
On the paperwork you will see Just Clinic Istanbul BBL. My first message didn’t mention money. I sent the list: the embolism, the cartoon bottom, the fat vanishing, and the pillow. The reply went through every one before anybody mentioned a price. I still live in a rented flat in Zone 3. I still get the Tube. I just don’t hide from shop windows any more.
The headlines
This is the one that kept me off the plane. I’d seen the headlines. Fat injected into a vessel, into the lungs, into the heart. Not waking up. Doing this to look better in jeans and dying for it felt insane. I cancelled the idea more than once.
I said it on the video call, without wrapping it up. He did not say the risk was zero. The deaths I had read about were mostly fat put deep in the muscle. On me it stayed in the layer under the skin, with ultrasound. I woke up. That is not the same as harmless. He also talked about volume limits in one session, and about a hospital that can actually deal with a bleed, not a clinic room with a nice sofa. That was the bit I had not got from Instagram. “We do not go into that deep zone,” he said. “The work stays in the fat under the skin.” I took a proper breath. The room was there. It was the operation they had described, not the one from the headlines.
Ant bum, nappy bum
Social media did as much damage as the news. Tiny legs and a shelf stuck on the back. Or a rectangle so wide it looked like a nappy under a dress. I wanted rid of the flatness. I did not want to be a joke on the street.
They talked about proportion, not volume for its own sake. He measured my shoulders and my hips and said the job was not a giant bottom. It was liposuction through the waist, then using that fat to fill the gaps at the sides of my hips, so the line from waist to thigh made sense. An hourglass, not a cartoon.
When the swelling dropped and I got out of the garment, that is what I had. My waist is smaller. My hips match my legs. In jeans I look like a woman, not like a meme. That was the whole point.
A year on, still there
Forums are full of women who looked great at week six and flat again at month six. I could not stand the idea of going through all of this and ending up back at the board.
He didn’t hide that some of the fat does not take. That is expected. That is why they put in a bit more than the amount they want to keep. What decides whether it lives, he said, is what you do afterwards: you do not sit on it, you let it keep a blood supply. I did what I was told. I ate. I used the pillow. I did not cheat on the sofa “just this once”.
It is more than a year on. What I had at six months is still there, the same roundness. It did not melt back to nothing. The money was not wasted. Neither were the weeks on my front.
The pillow on the office chair
The pillow. Weeks of not sitting normally. Sleeping on your front. Taking it to work. I thought I would lose my mind.
I will be honest: the first days were the worst of the whole thing. Sleeping on my front hurt my neck. Sitting with all the weight on my thighs felt ridiculous. Getting to the loo was a production. The nurses on the ward showed me how to place the pillow and how to turn in bed without rolling onto the graft. By the end of the second week it was just a thing I carried, like a bag. I put it on the office chair. People were less interested than I had expected. One woman in accounts asked if I had a bad back. I said yes, more or less. It was a temporary tax. Looking at the result now, I would have sat on that pillow longer.
Stones under the skin
I’d read about fat necrosis: hard cysts under the skin, like stones, that a hand would find. I was more embarrassed about that than I was about the pillow. I did not want to be touched and feel plastic.
The first weeks there was tightness. When I ran a hand over it I could feel a firmness that panicked me, so I messaged. They said that is the fat taking, and the swelling, and it is allowed. They had me do very gentle massage once I was cleared. By the third month the tightness had gone. It feels like flesh. Soft. My partner has not found a lump. It does not feel like an implant. It feels like me, with more of me in the right place.
Two full nights
Some packages treat a BBL like a day case: liposuction, injection, taxi, hotel, good luck. I had fat taken out of me. I could not imagine doing that night on my own.
It didn’t go like that. I came out of theatre and went up to a room on the ward, and I stayed two full nights. The nurses helped me stay on my front. They checked my blood pressure and the garment. The painkillers went in on time, through the drip. I never once thought: if I go downhill here, nobody will notice. The surgeon came both mornings.
Seven or eight nights
I stayed two full nights on the ward, on my front. I was in Istanbul seven or eight nights. I flew with the pillow when he had seen me, not because a package or a treatment page said ten to fourteen days.
You’d be soft not to ask, especially with this operation. Cheap and BBL in the same sentence is how the headlines get written. I stopped comparing prices and wrote a list. Which hospital, by name, and has it got intensive care and an A&E. Ultrasound or not. Where the fat is allowed to go, in writing. The surgeon’s registration, and how many of these he actually does. Who is giving me the anaesthetic. Two places sent a number and a gallery of huge bottoms. One sent documents and let me put the embolism question to the surgeon myself. I woke up in a large, serious hospital. I paid less than I’d have paid in London. I did not pay less for less. If you came here looking for BBL Turkey, that is what I asked for too: a hospital I could name.
Grey ticks
Me in my flat, a hard patch I didn’t like, and a WhatsApp with two grey ticks that never turn blue.
Didn’t happen. The woman from the clinic still answered after I landed in London. I sent photographs of my hips at about ten at night in week three. She came back later that night after showing the surgeon. She was also blunt about what not to wait on. Shortness of breath, a hot swollen leg, a temperature, pain getting worse — A&E here first, then her. Afterwards. Not instead of. I never had to. Knowing the list helped.
The board with my name
I know London. I did not know Istanbul, and I don’t have a word of Turkish. I kept picturing the wrong bit of the airport, or a taxi argument on my front, in a garment.
I came through arrivals and there was a man stood there holding a board with my name on it. After that a clinic car came for every journey. I never stood on a pavement trying to flag anyone with a pillow under my arm.
Mia, it went well
The operation worried me less than four in the morning. Needing to turn, feeling sick, not being able to explain, and signing a form I couldn’t read.
The woman from the clinic spoke fluent English and she was there for the parts that counted. The surgeon marked the liposuction and the injection zones on me standing up. She went through the consent forms with me line by line, in English, including the embolism paragraph, which I made her read twice. When I came round, the first voice I heard said my name and told me it had gone well.
Nobody pushed extra zones
I’d read that once you’re on the table they suggest hips, or thighs, or a bit more waist. I had other bits I wasn’t keen on. I was an easy yes if somebody pushed.
Nobody pushed. I asked for a BBL and a BBL is what was booked, quoted and done. Waist lipo, fat into the sides of my hips. No extra zones on the day. No surprise on the bill. If you landed on this page after BBL Just Clinic Istanbul, that is the list I actually had done. Not a 360. Not implants.
The woman in Manchester
I wanted someone who had slept on her front in that hospital, not a caption under a photograph. I asked on the first call. They put me in touch with a woman in Manchester who’d had hers eleven months before. I asked her about the embolism briefing, the pillow, the lumps. She was blunt. Days two and three you will wonder why you did it. Take the pillow to the airport. Then she said: “In jeans, I look like I always should have looked. Nobody says BBL. They say you’ve lost weight off your waist.”
That is what booked me.
I have a waist. I have a bottom
It’s a year and a bit on. I have a waist. I have a bottom. In a fitted dress I look like a person, not a hanger. It was fat put in the plane they said, two nights on a ward, a pillow I hated and then got used to, and people who answered the phone when I was back in London. Worth the fear. Worth more than the year I spent reading headlines and not asking the actual questions.
