I Burst My Own Breast Implants

Patti Tucker, 50, was so desperate to have her painful implants removed she took things into her own hands.

- Laura Thomas & Louise Baty

Reaching to my daughters Nichole, then 26, Cara, 18, and Chloe,13, for a group hug, I suddenly doubled over and gasped. The stabbing pain slicing through my chest and down my right arm brought tears to my eyes. The agony continued for 10 minutes until subsiding.

It was 2015 and I’d been suffering with chest pains for three years. I knew what was causing them and yet, sadly, I couldn’t see an end to them either.

‘I wish I’d never got these implants,’ I sighed, glancing at my 34DD bosom – the biggest regret of my life. I’d had them put in three years earlier after breastfeeding my three daughters had left my 34A boobs flat and droopy. I had always been confident of my body, having been a dancer in my twenties, so it had left me feeling very insecure.

I knew friends who’d had breast enlargements and, with my husband’s support, I found a surgeon near my home in Phoenix, Arizona. I was wheeled into surgery in 2002. The surgeon fitted the DD implants under the muscle in both breasts, before inflating them with saline. Initially, I was brimming with confidence at my new shape. But, as years passed, my breasts became ‘encapsulated’, meaning scar tissue had grown, causing the implants to become hard and uncomfortable. By now, we’d left the US and had moved to the UK to live in Bristol, so I couldn’t return to my original surgeon. I went to see my GP but he said the NHS wouldn’t fund a removal. ‘It’s like having bowling balls under my chin,’ I said, devastated.

I was even more alarmed when our older daughters talked about wanting big boobs like mine. ‘You’re perfect as you are,’ I said, worried that my insecurities had affected them.