A Scots mum has told how a botched Botox shot left out of work for 12 weeks with her face looking as though she had “suffered a stroke”.
Kathryn Tumulka, 34, opened up on her horror ordeal as Scotland was named the European capital of backstreet Botox surgeries. The mum-of-two, from Dalkeith in Midlothian, told how asked for her lips to be topped up with dermal fillers at a salon local to her in 2020.
But instead, the qualified practitioner roguely injected her cheek with a needle of Botox – leaving her client looking as though she had suffered a cerebrovascular accident for nearly three months.
Recounting the horror experience four years on, Kathryn told the Record: “I went back to a girl after I noticed one side of my lip being fuller than the other, so asked for a top up. When I arrived, she said she didn’t have any filler in. At that point, my lips looked ridiculous and I just wanted them sorted.
“Instead of suggesting I just wait for the filler to come in, she decided to stab my cheek with Botox because she thought this would somehow fill the other half of my lip out. It left me looking as if I had suffered a stroke – the left side of my face completely collapsed. It was a total disaster.”
Due to there being no reversal for Botox, Kathryn, who is a hairdresser, was left out of work until the treatment wore off.
She said: “I ended up contacting her and she wanted me to come back in, but at this point, I wasn’t leaving the house, I was mortified. I looked horrendous and it left me very self conscious.
“I ended up losing a lot of money because I just couldn’t face going to work with the way I looked. I didn’t socialise and tried to do as much as I could from home.”
Overall, Kathryn paid £100 for the initial lip jags. The Botox that left one side of her face drooping was given for free as the practitioner didn’t have any filler in stock. The mum eventually had her lips dissolved and corrected by another clinic.
She has now called on the Scottish Government to introduce better regulations in order to prevent backyard practitioners from “ruining” people’s faces.
Kathryn added: “I learned the hard way – I jumped at the cheap filler and thought it would be a great deal. It ended up being a complete disaster.
“There needs to be more stringent regulations in place to stop dodgy practitioners from causing serious damage to people’s faces. People working from their kitchen after completing a one-day course should not be allowed anywhere near anybody with a needle.
“Until these regulations are in place, I’d advise anybody looking to get botox or filler to seriously do their research.”
Elsewhere, a woman from Glasgow was left with bruising under her eyes and extreme swelling in her face after receiving botched tear trough filler in August. The woman, who wished not to be named, sourced the under-eye treatment on the cheap before she had to get it corrected by professionals at Ever Clinic in the city centre.
She has urged anybody considering aesthetics to ensure the clinic is registered with Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) – the watchdog of non-surgical treatments.
She said: “I knew a girl who did fillers, I knew she wasn’t a medic but she was cheap. She put in the filler despite not doing a proper assessment and immediately something went wrong. I had migrations of the filler and I looked massively overfilled. The girl who did it didn’t tell me no and I don’t think had the proper experience to advise me on the fact that it was wrong for me. She was happy to take my money.
“I was devastated. I looked really odd with the swelling and I didn’t look like myself. I spent more money getting the filler corrected than I saved by going to non regulated people. It’s not been an easy ride as the correction process can be uncomfortable and take a long time.
“There needs to be more awareness on these non medics. After spending two minutes looking on Facebook, anyone can find any butcher, candlemaker, electrician or plumber offering these procedures. There doesn’t seem to be any recourse when things go wrong and I don’t believe the training, if you can call it that, is any good.
“Training needs to be standardised and the people who are allowed to offer these procedures need to be limited to medics. After my experience, I’d advise others to do your research. The amount of money I’ve spent having my problem fixed is astronomical and the stress I’ve gone through has been overwhelming. The damage that was done to my tear trough I honestly believed was irreversible because it was so bad.
“Use people who are registered with HIS, and then find out more about their clinic before picking up the phone.”
Jonathan Toye, Co-owner at Ever Clinic, said: “To hear that the UK is named the backstreet capital of Europe for my industry is, while desperately upsetting, not surprising. Our team at Ever Clinic are constantly fielding calls from prospective patients who have had work carried out by non-medics and had it gone drastically wrong. As a clinic we remove more filler than we put in.
“In recent times, we’ve had patients contact us because they’ve received treatment at the hands of someone who claims to be an expert after a one day course and have lost part of their lip, or have golf ball sized holes in their face from injections of products that are sourced from only god knows where.
“What is becoming more frightening is that non-medics are becoming much more brazen, and move on from offering injectables to surgical procedures. Our team has seen and heard of non-medics offering liposuction, facelifts and tummy tucks. The fact that the law allows surgical procedures to be carried out, without repercussion, by nail techs and hairdressers is frightening.
“These patients are given terrible advice by the non-medics when a complication occurs which ultimately results in them being delayed to being seen by us who can assess and treat properly. Almost all of the time the advice they receive is similar to the advice given to patients during the plague by Quacks. In other cases it isn’t unusual for the non-medic to disappear.
“Patients also don’t appreciate that while they might be receiving something perceived as a good deal by the non-medic, having the complication treated properly is very expensive. And so any savings initially realised by attending the unregulated, are lost when it goes wrong.
“When we ask patients why, when they know the real risks associated with attending non-medical injectors, they chose to go there over someone regulated they often tell us their friend went or the social media page was beautiful or the cheap price was the deciding factor. With any surgical or non surgical procedure, the decision to undertake these should be based on experience and ability to treat the complications should they arise.”
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