Is Thigh Lift in Turkey Safe? A UK Patient's Experience

The jeans at Tynemouth

I’m Emily. I’m thirty-eight and I live in Newcastle. Three years ago I had a gastric sleeve. The weight came off the way I’d hoped, and then some. I’m not going to pretend that part wasn’t brilliant. What nobody sat me down and said is that the skin doesn’t always come with you. My inner thighs emptied out and stayed. Hanging. When I walked, the loose bit on one leg caught the loose bit on the other and swung, and by the end of a shift on my feet the skin in there was hot and raw and I’d be waddling to the car.

Summer was the worst. Talc in my bag, cycling shorts under every dress, and a drawer of shorts I’d bought in a hopeful mood and never once put on. There’s a photo of me at Tynemouth in July in jeans while everybody else is in the sea. I’d lost eleven stone and I was still getting dressed around my legs.

I went and got quoted here, twice. Both numbers were completely out of reach. Not save-up-for-a-year out of reach, and one of the consultations lasted about eleven minutes. So I started reading about thigh lift Turkey the way half of Newcastle seems to have done. Some of it was lovely. Some of it kept me awake: wounds coming apart in the groin, women describing scars that had slid halfway down their leg. One night I stopped scrolling and typed the actual question: is a thigh lift in Turkey safe? Not is it cheap. Is it safe.

I wrote to Just Clinic Istanbul. I did not open with money. I sent the fears: the stitches in the groin coming open, the scar sliding down the thigh, infection somewhere you can’t keep dry. The reply went through every one of them before anybody mentioned a price. On the papers they wrote Just Clinic Istanbul thigh lift next to a hospital name I could check. If you landed here looking for thigh lift Just Clinic Istanbul, you’re where I was eighteen months ago, sat up in bed at one in the morning.

The penguin walk on the ward

This was the fear. Not the anaesthetic, not the flight. The cut for an inner thigh lift sits right up in the crease at the top of the leg, and that crease bends every time you take a step or sit down. I couldn’t work out how stitches in a place that folds hundreds of times a day were supposed to stay shut. I’d read dehiscence on a forum, and once you’ve read that word you can’t unread it.

The surgeon on the video call didn’t brush it off. He said the mistake is thinking the skin is holding the leg up. It isn’t, and if it is, you get exactly the problem I was frightened of. He anchors the deep layer, the fascia, to the fixed tissue up in the groin. That deep stitch carries the weight. The skin seam on top is only closed over the work. He said it in a way I understood: the strong stitch is the one you never see.

Then he told me my job. Small steps. Short, flat-footed ones, no long strides and nothing that stretched that crease open for the first fortnight. Everyone calls it the penguin walk and that’s exactly what it is. I did it down the hospital corridor the morning after on a nurse’s arm, and round the hotel room for days after. That is what thigh lift Turkey recovery was for me: a fortnight of shuffling. My wound stayed closed. Not a stitch of it opened — not on the walking, not on the flight, not once I was home.

Dry heals, wet goes wrong

Nobody talks about the loo and it’s the bit I actually worried about at four in the morning. A fresh wound in your groin, and the toilet two inches from it. I thought I’d be dirty for a fortnight and get an infection because of it.

The nurses treated it as the most ordinary thing in the world. The first day or two they came with me, helped me up and showed me how to sit and get back up without letting my knees drift apart. After that I was doing it myself. Dry is what heals, wet is what goes wrong. Pat, never rub. Wipe away from the line, never back towards it. Antibiotic spray after, a light dry dressing on top. Loose cotton knickers, a size up, nothing with elastic on the crease. Swing both knees together, sit down as one movement. I felt about ninety. I never had a smell off it, never a hot patch, never a temperature. No infection at all.

Shorts on the Quayside

I’d seen the before-and-afters where the line has crept down the inside of the leg and sits there in the open. Swapping loose skin I can hide for a scar I can’t is not a trade.

He was straight about why it happens. If all the tension is on the skin, the skin gives, and the scar gets dragged down the thigh with it. Same problem as the wound coming apart, just in slow motion. Anchoring the deep layer up to the fixed tissue in the groin is what stops the whole thing sliding. He also said, plainly, that the scar exists and no version of this comes without one.

Mine has stayed where he put it. It sits up in the fold at the top of my leg, inside my knickers and inside a bikini bottom. It has not dropped down my thigh. There is no line running down the inner thigh. It went a dark pinky colour for a good few months and I had a proper wobble about it around week seven, and then it faded the way they said it would. I wore shorts last summer for the first time since I was in my twenties, walked from the Quayside up to town in thirty degrees, and got home with skin that wasn’t sore. No chafing. That’s the bit I still notice most.

I have a partner, so I’m not going to be coy. Four to six weeks, and the rule wasn’t about sex as such — it was about not forcing that crease open while it’s knitting. No pulling the leg out wide. I waited. At six weeks I had my check and the surgeon told me it was fine. I’d felt fine at four. I went by what he said. Nothing tore. Nothing gave.

Two nights, then the hotel

The story that put me off for months was coming out of theatre and being dropped at a hotel by teatime, half asleep, sorting my own tablets. On legs that can barely walk, that sounded mad.

It wasn’t like that. I came out of theatre and went up to a room on the ward, and I stayed two nights. Nurses on all night. I used the buzzer twice and somebody came within a couple of minutes both times. The drip was changed when it was due. The painkillers came round on the dot. In the morning the surgeon who’d done the operation looked at both legs himself, went through the walking again, and only then was I discharged to the hotel. I was in Istanbul seven nights altogether. My flight home wasn’t booked until after a final check where they looked at both wounds and told me I was safe to fly. No drains. Nobody mentioned putting one in, and nobody took one out.

The person who had my file

When something costs a fraction of Newcastle, the fair question is what’s been left out. Which hospital, and does it have intensive care and an A&E in the same building. Is it accredited, and by whom. The surgeon’s name, his registration. Who the anaesthetist would be. What happens, and who pays, if something needs putting right later. I asked all of it and I got answers with paperwork. I woke up in a big serious hospital with a nurse at the end of the bed. I just didn’t pay Newcastle prices for it.

What nearly stopped me booking was me in the flat, a wound looking angry, and a message sat there with two grey ticks forever. The woman who wrote back to my very first message was still the one answering months later. Around week four the scar started itching so badly I was convinced something was wrong under it. I took photos of my groin at about eleven at night. She replied that night, after she’d shown the surgeon, and told me the itch is what healing feels like when the nerve endings start waking up. She asked for another photo four days later.

She was also clear about what she wasn’t going to handle down a phone. A temperature, redness spreading out from the line, pain getting worse, or any leaking — GP or straight to A&E here first, then message her. Not instead of. After. I never needed to, but I knew what I was watching for.

My sister and the board with my name

I’d never been further than Malaga. I don’t speak a word of Turkish. I was travelling with my sister, not a tour group, not on my own. In my head I was stood in the wrong terminal with a suitcase, or out on a kerb arguing a taxi fare with my legs bandaged.

None of that happened. We came out at arrivals and there was a man holding a board with my name on it. After that a clinic car for every journey: hotel to hospital, hospital back to the hotel, and back again for the check-up. Not once did I stand at the side of a road negotiating anything, which mattered the week I was doing the penguin walk.

The same woman stood with me while the surgeon marked my legs in front of the mirror. She went through the consent line by line, in English, including the risk paragraphs. I stopped her twice. She did it without a sigh. A nurse on the ward wrote my tablet times on a bit of paper. The thing I remember best is coming round and hearing my own name, telling me it had gone well.

I asked the surgeon myself whether I should be thinking about my tummy while I was there. He said no. One operation, one recovery, and come back and talk about anything else in a year when I’d seen how my legs settled. I flew home having had exactly the operation I flew out for.

The hour with Leeds

Before I booked I asked for a British woman who’d had this operation with them. Not a testimonial on a website. They put me in touch with a woman in Leeds. We were on the phone for the best part of an hour. She told me the things a clinic never will. The first four days are grim and you will regret the whole thing on day two. Take your own dry shampoo. The garment is horrible in the heat but you keep it on anyway. She showed me her scar on a video call and I could barely make it out. She’d worn a swimming costume that summer without giving it a thought. That conversation is what made me book. A woman from Leeds telling me the truth about day two.

It’s eighteen months on now. My thighs don’t swing. My legs don’t rub when I walk. There’s a pale line in the fold at the top of each leg that only I ever see. A fortnight of shuffling like a penguin and six weeks of doing as I was told. Last summer I wore shorts on the Quayside. The chafing is gone. That is the end of it.