‘Sorry about that’, I slur to the taxi driver, as I fall out of the cab clutching a wad of bloodied dressings. ‘Still leaking a bit…s’normal, apparently…’ He looks at me in disgusted incomprehension. My girdle rides up as I haul myself to my feet and I see my girlfriend’s horrified face as she spots my fluid-encrusted, swollen stomach. Welcome to the glamorous world of cosmetic surgery. 
My girdle is soaked through on both sides, bloody fluid spreading out from the holes like some kind of revolting inkblot 
We’re well used to seeing celebrities magically erase 20 years off their face or inexplicably lose 8 stone in a fortnight. Cosmetic surgery is such an accepted fact among the famous, that a sizable number of ordinary people are getting in on the act. The number of girls getting boob jobs has reportedly risen by 150 per cent in the last couple of years, while treatments such as Botox and chemical peels have become so readily available, they’re barely considered cosmetic surgery at all. More surprisingly, the number of men getting cosmetic surgery is on the increase, with the three most popular options being face-lifts, penis enlargements and, at number one, liposuction. In the interest of journalistic integrity (and not looking like a fatty on the beach this summer), I decided to give the most popular option a go.
My first consultation is an odd, yet reassuring experience. My surgeon – Dr. Maurizio Viel, a soft spoken, incredibly serious man who runs the London Centre For Aesthetic Surgery with, believe it or not, his twin brother – asks me to take off my t-shirt as he prods and pokes the beer gut that I’ve never managed to lose since university. He grabs folds of belly flesh between his fingers and squeezes them. It’s uncomfortably intimate - I wouldn’t even let my girlfriend do this to me. ‘Hmm’, he murmurs. ‘I think you have the perfect body for cosmetic surgery.’ I try not to take offence. Hanging from one wall is a huge oil painting of Maurizio and his brother standing either side of a topless woman – a gift from a patient, apparently - that undermines the solemnity of his evaluation somewhat. ‘I think we will have a great result from this procedure. You are young, you will have a good shape’ he explains. The ‘procedure’ he mentions is the latest thing in surgical weight-loss: liposelection, a procedure that costs around £4,000. The first clinic to practice it in the UK, it’s designed to be less invasive, gentler and with a faster recovery time than traditional liposuction. Rather than the old method of beating the fat from the inside of the skin and removing it as a solid, this liquefies the fat inside the body using ultrasonic energy, leaving normal tissue intact but dissolving fat cells. As a sucker for anything a bit futuristic, I figure that even if something goes horribly wrong I’ll probably at least end up with super powers, so I agree to give it a go.
First Cut
The day of the operation, I’m sitting in the recovery room, dressed in a fetching ensemble of paper surgical gown, knee-length deep-vein thrombosis prevention socks and a pair of tiny pants that appear to have been made from a string vest. The anaesthesiologist is asking me if I’ve taken any drugs recently. ‘No’, I tell him, honestly. ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. Some people, it seems, are inclined to lie about this, and after several nasty experiences on the operating table (if you’ve been on cocaine shortly before an op that requires you to be sedated, it plays merry hell with their calculations) he’s very strict on this point. Satisfied that I’m not lying, he explains that I won’t be under general anaesthetic, merely fully sedated. The difference is that, while sedated, my muscles will still be responsive to touch, letting the surgeon know how deep to go and minimising the chance of my being accidentally impaled. Following this, Maurizio enters, takes a few last photos and marks my body with a fat purple marker pen. ‘You will have some small scars’, he warns me. ‘I’m going to make five incisions: one in your belly-button, two just below your belt line and two in your back, either side of your spine. It’s possible that you may leak fluid and blood out of these holes for up to 24 hours after the operation.’ He adds splotches of ink to the spots as he talks, reminding me of John Travolta trying to administer the adrenalin shot in Pulp Fiction. ‘Now I will leave you to administer your suppository and fetch you when you are ready.’
Ah. The suppository. For the uninitiated, a hard lump of chemicals the size and shape of a tampon, designed to induce pain relief and mild sedation when inserted rectally. Having never tried to insert a tampon into my bum before, I struggle: my arsehole keeps spitting it out like a petulant baby being force-fed its greens. Every time I think it’s all the way in, I stand up straight only to find it forcing its way out again. I grit my teeth and shove hard. Holy fucking Christ… Finally, it goes in and stays there. Very, very gingerly, I sit down. Holding my belly in my hands for what will, presumably, be the last time, I feel bad that I never really tried to get rid of it through more traditional methods. What I’m doing now is essentially a violently intrusive abortion for my beer gut, and I feel sorry for it.
Lying facedown on the operating table, I have the I.V. inserted into my hand. Billie Jean is playing on a stereo in the corner and Tom, the photographer, is giving me a mildly sarcastic thumbs up (he’s spent the last week or so phoning me just to say, ‘How’s it going, Fatty?’ as a sort of encouragement to go through with the operation). Thoroughly scared by now (the last time I had surgery was to have my tonsils out at the age of 5), I whimper softly to the anaesthesiologist, ‘I’m going to be ok, aren’t I?’ He nods, pushes the plunger on a hypodermic and then everything goes dark.
Chubby Berk
What seems like a second later (but in reality is over 2 hours), I’m being pulled into a sitting position. ‘Huh? Whuzza..?’ Tom is smirking, Maurizio is nowhere to be seen, 2 nurses are helping me up and, somehow, I’m wearing a skin-tight, flesh-coloured girdle. Disorientated and slurring, I say the line I’d been determined would be my first words afterwards. ‘How am I? Do I still look vaguely human, or have I turned into Julian Lloyd Webber?’ (my favourite line from Christmas TV-movie, Bernard And The Genie). There is a dazed blur and then I’m in the bed in the recovery room. Tom is clearly dying to tell me something. ‘What?’ I bark, panicked. ‘How’s the sedative?’ he asks. ‘What do you mean?’ I’m getting very nervous now. ‘Must be good stuff’, he grins. ‘When that nurse helped you up, you grabbed her and tried to waltz her round the operating theatre.’ My jaw drops. ‘What?’ ‘It was very impressive, with your blood stains and your arse hanging out.’ I close my eyes. ‘Oh God. Did I at least make the Julian Lloyd Webber joke?’ Tom pulls a face. ‘Yeah. You made it five times in total. Then you refused to get off the table till you’d had your photo taken holding all of your old fat. Even sedated, you’re a berk.’
He shows me pictures from the operation, that turn what’s left of my stomach. ‘You know those long metal rods he had?’ he asks, referring to the instruments used to remove the fat. ‘They went in you, right up to the hilt!’ he exclaims. I shudder, which hurts. Bizarrely, I find a photo of myself, wide awake and turning myself over during the operation. I have no memory of these events at all: apparently, this is just another advantage of sedation over anaesthetic.
After a final check-up, my girlfriend arrives to bundle me into a taxi. At this point, I sit up and feel something coursing down my back. It’s the leftover emulsifying fluid from the operation, combined with blood and liquefied fat, and it’s flowing freely out of two holes in my back. I’d been told to expect leaking, but this is more akin to gushing: I realise I’m lying in a pool of pinkish gunk, and I gesture helplessly for something to mop it up with. A nurse gives me a bin-liner filled with absorbing pads to lie on (imagine a sanitary towel two feet across and you’re in the right area) and I hobble to the taxi, sodden and confused. Any time I move or the cab hits a bump, all 5 holes squirt fluid. I go through 5 of the pads just on the ride home. The girdle is horribly constrictive and would make sitting up awkward even if I hadn’t just had over 2 litres of fat removed from my stomach, back and hips. I fall out of the cab and, clutching my big sack of pads, stumble up the stairs to my flat. Spreading 3 pads out, I ease myself onto my back, take a painkiller and some antibiotics and attempt to sleep it off. 5 minutes later, all 3 pads are totally soaked through and I have to start again. This goes on all night, a night in which I sleep for a total of fifteen minutes.
Aftermath
By the next morning, I’ve gone through every one of the pads: they lie, balled-up and scabbed, next to the bed. My girdle is soaked through on both sides, bloody fluid spreading out from the holes like some kind of revolting inkblot. The bed itself stinks like an old kebab. It hurts to move, let alone stand up. I feel disgusted with my own body. I have to keep the girdle on for a week and I already can’t bear having it on. If I remove it, though, my skin will fail to stick back onto my body and I’ll be left with flappy, sagging skin all over my torso. Some choice. Later that day, I go back to the clinic to have my moist, smelly girdle replaced with a clean one. As the nurse removes it, I look down, expecting to see my body ravaged and hanging, but instead my stomach looks smooth and, most surprisingly, already considerably flatter. A brief wipe-down and a new girdle later, I feel a lot better. It still hurts to move, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve slept face-down in a sack of burger grease and offal anymore.
The next few days are spent mostly in bed, since getting in and out of it feels like the skin is being torn from my torso (which, possibly, is exactly what’s happening). After another couple of days, this pain is replaced by the pain of severe bruising as I see alarming, brightly-clashing colours emerging on every bit of visible skin on my body. If this is the new, gentle treatment, I shudder to think what traditional liposuction must be like. By now I’m hobbling around, but it still hurts to walk more than a few feet. Which is unfortunate, since I have to move house the following weekend. Ignoring Maurizio’s advice to not lift anything heavy, I attempt to pack my possessions, wincing with every bend and stretch. One day, squatting next to the umpteenth box in just my girdle and a dressing gown (a pleasant sight, I’m sure), I feel something a little…wrong in my groin. I look down and shriek in horror as I see that one half of my penis has swollen to almost the size of a tennis ball. Falling backwards, I scrabble at my groin, trying to inspect the rest of it. The underneath of my knob has turned completely black, like bad fruit: it is misshapen and grotesque. My balls look weird too, but compared to the horror of my actual penis, they’re a secondary consideration. I grab my phone and ring Maurizio’s mobile: gentleman that he is, even late on a Sunday evening, he answers. ‘Hello Nick, are you well?’ I’m trying to keep calm. ‘No!’ I want to gibber, uselessly. ‘My genitals are rotten!’ Instead, I stammer politely. ‘Hi Maurizio. Um, yeah, sort of, not really. I’ve got a bit of a, er, personal problem.’ ‘Ah, I see. Your testicles have turned blue and swollen?’ He asks it as though it is the most normal thing in the world. I am amazed. ‘Well – pretty much, yeah. It’s my penis, actually.’ Maurizio is unfazed. ‘Yes, that’s completely normal. Your entire body is swollen and bruised following the operation, and bruising and swelling naturally gravitate downwards. They’ll be fine in a few days.’ I begin to sag backwards in relief. ‘It happens to women as well, you know’ he adds, ominously. I gag at the resultant mental image. Some things don’t bear thinking about.
A few days later, following the novel experience of peeing out of an almost entirely spherical and bright blue cock (while my balls, bulbous and a threatening shade of yellow, hang at a sideways angle underneath), the swelling starts to subside a little. Finally, the day of the girdle removal comes – I have never been so relieved to see the back of anything. A lot of my torso – particularly the sides – are still numb, a sensation caused by temporary nerve damage that can last up to 2 months following an op. I look at my body – it’s wonky with swelling. Any time I wear jeans with a tight waistband, I hold the shape of them in my abdomen for several hours after, like a memory-foam mattress. This, too, gradually goes away over the next month or so, and eventually I’m approved to go back to the gym to work off the last of the fat. I already look far slimmer and healthier than I did before the procedure, and I get a fit of girlish excitement every time I try on an item of clothing that wouldn’t have fitted 2 months previously.
Maurizio claims that I should be able to get a six-pack with far less effort than most people, since the fat cells in my torso have been permanently (relatively, at least) removed. Going to the gym with the magical words, ‘You don’t need to lose any weight, just tone up a bit’ ringing in my ears, I step onto the treadmill. Next to me, a bloke my age is gruntily sweating through a jog. His beer belly, roughly the same size as mine 2 months ago, writhes and gurgles under his sweaty vest. I look down at my strangely flat and immobile stomach with the smugness of a kid who’s got away with cheating their way to good GCSE results. This, I realise, is how celebrities must feel when they look at the rest of us. I think I like it.
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