Woman couldn’t eat for three years after botched £2,000 weight loss surgery in Turkey left her intestines ‘like concrete’ – until NHS surgeons built her a new stomach

A woman who was left ‘turned to concrete’ inside after a failed Turkish weight loss operation can eat solid food for the first time in three years after surgeons created a new stomach for her.

Pinky Jolley, from Wirral, Merseyside, raised £2,000 through crowdfunding to help pay for gastric bypass surgery in November 2022 after weighing 17st 11lbs.

The 46-year-old diabetic, who wore size 24 clothing, wanted to lose weight when she ended up in a wheelchair due to medical complications and gained quite a few pounds as a result.

But Ms Jolly, who runs an online dog adoption service, found surgery in Turkey was her “only option” after trying several low-calorie diets.

However, the “horrific ordeal” that saw Turkish surgeons remove 85 percent of her stomach left her feeling “deluded”, “distraught” and unable to eat.

Ms Jolly was told by doctors to consider weight loss surgery in 2018 after she was rushed to hospital with pancreatitis (an inflammation of the pancreas, which sits in the abdomen and produces essential hormones) and sepsis.

Pancreatitis, which causes nausea and vomiting, is more common in overweight people and can be life-threatening if left untreated.

Mrs Jolly, who says her weight gain is partly due to a hormone disorder, says: ‘I’ve tried calorie-restricted diets, Slimming World and even pills prescribed by my GP.

Friends told me on Facebook that it is possible to have weight loss surgery in Turkey for a fraction of the cost of private surgery in the UK.

‘Because I didn’t know that Turkey was “cheap” while the UK was “expensive”, I thought this was my only option.’

She raised £2,100 on GoFundMe for accommodation, flights and the surgery, and after booking the procedure, flew away two months later.

When she arrived at the clinic in Istanbul, she became concerned because the doctors “barely spoke English,” but she went ahead with the surgery anyway.

When she recovered from the two-hour surgery, she felt seriously ill and suffered from severe abdominal pain, vomiting and dehydration.

Four days later she went home and visited her family doctor, who advised her to go to the hospital immediately.

Doctors performed a CT scan, which showed she had an infection and a ball of hardened pus inside her.

Ms Jolly also had to undergo emergency surgery in January, during which three doctors jetted out the inside of her stomach to remove the infection.

She could only eat food through a special tube that went into her nose and throat, and the doctors warned her that she would almost certainly never be able to eat solid food again.

But surgeons at Solihull Hospital this week performed a groundbreaking operation to give her a new stomach.

Mrs. Jolly now plans to celebrate her new life by feasting on her favorite dish: garlic mushrooms and cheese.

“I know it won’t fix everything and it won’t be a cure, but I will be able to eat again,” she said.

She added: ‘I can go out with friends again and have a life.

‘I feel misled and angry that something that should have helped has caused me so much pain.

‘I lost 20 kilos in four weeks because my stomach was so small.

‘I wanted to lose 47 kilos in two years.

‘I had to have a feeding tube to help it, but everything hurts so much.

“They completely botched the surgery and left my intestines so infected that they were completely hard and looked like concrete,” the doctors said.

“It was a horrible ordeal, I just want to get better. In hindsight it was so cheap I should have thought twice about it, but I just got so carried away.”

Mrs Jolly, who now weighs 25lbs and wears size 18, hopes to be able to go home from hospital within a few weeks because of her new belly.

During the most recent operation, lead surgeon Professor Rishi Singhal helped to repair the internal structure of her colon, liver and spleen, which had become stuck and were no longer in their normal place after the failed Turkish operation.

He and his team performed a bypass surgery, creating a small pouch from the upper part of her stomach and attaching it to her small intestine.

Professor Singhal said dissecting her stomach was “like cutting through concrete”.

He added: ‘Normally this would be a routine operation but given the state of her bowels, on a scale of one to 10, this is an 11.’

‘Surgeons elsewhere in the NHS have refused to do this.’

Ms Jolly is not the only British woman to have suffered health problems after going under the knife in Turkish cities such as Istanbul.

In Turkey alone, it is estimated that it costs the NHS £94 million a year to repair botched plastic surgeries, while also wasting much-needed patient hospital beds, NHS consultant Dr Rajan Uppal has warned.

He explained the real cost of this to the NHS, saying that if one patient a month required treatment in each of the UK’s 900-plus hospitals, it would result in an estimated annual cost of £94 million and 58,000 days of lost NHS beds.

He explained that he sees at least one Briton with complications every month, while thousands of people still visit clinics in Turkey despite the increased risks associated with cheap operations.