And the model, once considered one of Brazil's most beautiful females, vowed to spend the rest of her life alerting other women to the dangers of drastic surgery.
Recalling the moment she 'died', Andressa said: 'I knew that I'd left my body and died. I arrived in an empty place, like a desert, completely silent. That's when I knew that God exists. I felt his presence. I knew I was at the judgement.
'My life flashed before me like a film. I felt ashamed and knew I wasn't worthy to enter heaven. I asked for forgiveness and begged for another chance, promised to make amends.
'I'll never forget it. Coming face to face with death, I realised that nothing else mattered. Everything I had battled for, my beauty, my bags, my clothes, my car - I'd left all that behind. It was the moment I realised I was nothing, that we are only here on this world to save our souls.'
She continued: 'I'd give everything to turn back time and do things differently. Nobody knows what I'm going through, I'm in constant agony. I'm still in the middle of a horrible nightmare.
'All this I'm going through is punishment for my stupid vanity.
'I'm ashamed of the holes in my legs, the scars that will be there for the rest of my life. But they are also a trophy that I got through this alive. Now, thanks to God, I'm able to tell other women that vanity isn't everything. If all this serves as an example to warn others of the dangers of these things, to save other women from a premature death, then that was the reason I had to go through it.'
She told MailOnline: 'I'm paying now for my vanity. I was extremely vain. Everything in search of perfection. But instead of making my body more beautiful I ended up damaging it instead and making it ugly.
'I never thought twice about going under the knife, and when people warned me of the dangers I just thought, "I'll deal with that if it happens". I'd go to the doctor like I go to the supermarket, saying I wanted this, that and the other. I just wanted people to look at me and think, "wow".
'Plastic surgery became an addiction for me. Even when the hydrogel started causing me problems and I began to have it removed, I was there on the surgery table planning the next procedure I wanted.
I was actually planning to have one of my ribs removed to make me slimmer, and one of my toes removed to make my feet thinner. Can you believe that? That's how out of control it had got
'I was actually planning to have one of my ribs removed to make me slimmer, and one of my toes removed to make my feet thinner. Can you believe that? That's how out of control it had got. That's why I think what happened to me was God telling me, 'hold on, you need to stop'.
'The pain is indescribable. It's like my skin and muscles have been ripped to shreds. It's a terrible pain that goes down right to my bones. No-one should ever have to go through this.'
Andressa's obsession with her looks began when she was still a child, when she dreamed of being one of the young helpers on children's TV superstar Xuxa's programme.
Her hopes were put on hold when, aged just 15, she married her 17-year-old boyfriend, which whom she had a son, Artur, now aged nine. She studied administration and began working at a marketing firm.
When she separated aged 21, Andressa decided to follow her dream of becoming a famous model and moved to Brazil's biggest city, Sao Paulo.
She said: 'I always considered myself ugly. I was really thin as a teenager, I even got bullied at school for being so bony. I wasn't tall enough to be a catwalk or catalogue model, but I wanted to be famous. It was a time when all beautiful women on TV had curves, big bottoms and thighs. Society dictated to me how I should look if I wanted to be successful.
'I started taking steroids, but they didn't work, so I opted for surgery.'
Andressa said: 'After Miss Bumbum everything changed. I was no longer struggling to make a living, I was in demand everywhere. I'd finally made it.'
But things started going wrong at the end of 2013, when Andressa started experiencing sharp stabbing pains in her upper legs.
She recalled: 'The hydrogel hadn't absorbed into my body and instead had started to drip down to the tops of my knees, where a big ball started to form. I had been going to the gym lifting weights and that had caused it to become inflamed.
'I went to two doctors but they refused to touch me, they didn't want to have to correct another surgeon's mistakes. In the end a surgeon friend of the family agreed to help and I started procedures to remove the fillers. I would go every few months and have the amount that had collected above my knee removed, then within weeks it had started to accumulate again.
'I started wearing long skirts to hide what was happening. I didn't want anyone seeing how ugly my legs had become.
'But I imagined I would soon be back to normal. I'd put them in, and it was a simple matter of removing them. Most of the time I was busy planning even more drastic things on my body.'
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