Sultry media personality Thando Thabethe panicked as she thought she was bleeding to death after undergoing liposuction at a Joburg aesthetics facility last year.
Also the producer of her show Unstoppable, Tumi Maimela, was admitted to hospital after she suffered heart failure allegedly due to excessive bleeding from breast reduction, 360 liposuction and Brazilian Butt Lift surgeries at Vivari Aesthetics.
The shocking details are contained in letter of complaint Maimela sent to the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) after the procedures, which were expected to be beamed on her show that is flighted on BET, allegedly went awry.
Maimela’s complaint, which was partly dismissed by the HPCSA, has been attached to the R5-million lawsuit Vivari filed against her and her company Redwood Productions, at the Joburg High Court last week after she failed to settle the bill for the procedures.
In the complaint, which we have seen, Maimela alleged that she and Thabethe, a presenter at 947 FM, arrived at Vivari Aesthetics on November 25 to go under the knife.
She lamented that the procedures took about eight hours after she had been informed it would be done in four-and-half hours.
“ Once I came to [the facility], I was placed in what they call a “specialised cosmetic surgery clinic and hospital” at around 7.30pm.
“At around 11pm my drip came out as the nurse was helping me change position from my back to my stomach.
“This nurse called my aesthetic doctor, Dineo Hamilton, who told her to put the drip back in, to which she explained she was unable to as she had never done this before,” reads the complaint.
Maimela said she stayed in pain without a drip from around midnight to the following morning. The only thing she was given to manage the pain from her eight hours surgery, she said, was a suppository.
She said the following day (on Saturday night), the facility experienced loadshedding for about six hours. During this period, she said, the Vivari medical team was unable to monitor her vitals.
“On the 16th of December, I was admitted to Life Fourways hospital, where I was informed that I had lost a lot of blood during the surgery. I was puzzled that so many professionals were in the room for the surgery and no one picked up that the amount of blood that was lost was enough to cause my haemoglobin level to drop to eight and therefore cause heart failure,” read the complaint.
She said she believed the overall facility was not in good standing to operate patients.
The nurses at the facility, she added, were not registered, and this was confirmed by the facility’s doctor, Anushka Reddy.
Maimela further claimed the facility was under-equipped for any surgery and lacked post-surgical care.
“If post-op existed, the fact that I had lost so much blood would have been picked up.
“I was told I had a heart failure due to the amount of blood lost in the surgery. My body was struggling to pump the little blood left after the surgery around my body, and my cardiologist said my heart was about to give in. This could have been prevented had I had the adequate care needed for a surgery of this magnitude,” read the complaint.
She further said a plastic surgeon at Fourways Life hospital, where she was admitted, told her in confidence that they had done two procedures at Vivari but stopped working there as it was not sterile and there was no aircon in theatre.
“My best friend, Thando Thabethe, had her lipo done the day after mine. She ended up extremely swollen and they opened some stitches to let the liquid that looked like blood run out. She panicked and thought she was bleeding to death (sic).
“Dr Anushka called me to the side when my friend was bleeding and asked me why she was acting up and as if she was going through PMS as her period had just started.
“I was in the room when my friend was bleeding and it looked like a little waterfalls of blood gushing out of her. This was extremely traumatic for me to witness. She needed me. That is when Dr Anushka said that Vivari is not a hospital. If I had known it was not a hospital I wouldn’t have [undergone the procedures}.
Thabethe declined to comment.
The HPCSA dismissed most of her complaints. (See the story below).
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