Woman who spent £600 on 'influencer' eyelid surgery left with 'bleeding' eyes
A woman was left 'crying blood' in an airport after a botched eyelid surgery she'd first heard about on social media.
Nikita Morgan, 31, had always struggled with her hooded eyes and felt that they were 'very heavy', as she even asked her mother as a child if she could cut the skin off.
As she grew older, she learnt about a surgical procedure known as a blepharoplasty, which removes or repositions excess skin around the eyelids.
She looked into having the surgery done in her native Dublin but was quoted around €4000 (£3385) - something she would have to spend years to save up for.
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Nikita instead joined a waitlist for a clinic in Dusseldorf and she was delighted once she was finally able to go ahead with the procedure, but things soon went south.
She said: "I started to get a bit nervous on the bed but the surgeon marked off how much excess skin I wanted off on my eyelids and got me to check it.
"She injected my first eye with the needle to numb me and I leapt off the bed. I winced because it's so foreign injecting your eyelids.
"I don't think the second eye was done enough as I could feel it dripping off my face. I told her and she said it was fine.
"With the first eye, I could feel it but it wasn't painful. But the smell of my skin burning was turning my stomach.
"The blood drained out of my face, it was horrible. I felt so sick. When my surgeon went onto the second eye, I could feel all the burning and smell it.
"I was squirming on the bed and she was pushing down on my eyelids. The pressure was mental.
"She started stitching up my first eye and I could feel it but it wasn't painful. With the second eye, at that point I was white as a ghost. I could feel the sharpness of the needle going through my skin."
Nikita received stitches and steri-strips on her surgery site and said the whole procedure was over in less than 30 minutes, but she was left in 'agony' with her face feeling like it was 'on fire'.
Nikita explained: "I couldn't see but I couldn't close my eyes - they were glazed over.
"I had an ice pack on my eyes but my whole face was on fire.
"I ran into the bathroom as I was so nauseous over the smell. The pressure of gagging was hurting my eyes.
"I told the receptionist I thought I was going to faint and they took me to another room to lay down.
"I stayed there for two hours because I felt so ill."
The saleswoman insists that she wasn't given any advice about aftercare and she found herself in the airport, where her eyes began to bless profusely, and things only got worse after she fell asleep on her flight.
She said: "I was trying to navigate security in the airport and I couldn't see anything.
"Every time I tried to look up or to the side, blood was pouring down my face. It was like I was crying blood.
"I thought what am I doing here, over a small piece of skin on my face?"
Eventually she was happy with her results, but the misinformation she'd received online meant that she was far from prepared for what she'd had to go through just to make the small change to her eyelids.
Although she's had previous procedures, this one proved to be a hellish experience all round, and she's now raising awareness about the dangers of other surgeries you might hear about online.
She concluded: "It was a trauma over a small piece of skin. I'm lucky I went all through that not for nothing.
"Don't listen to everything on social media and take it as gospel.
"You see real people with real experiences - it might be that for some people but also it might not."
James Moorhouse