From the outside, Mariam Aldaraji looks like she is having a great time with her husband, twin boys, and two girls. She knows she could have lost everything, though.
“I did feel like I was going to leave soon at that time,” Aldaraji said. A cut in her stomach turned into necrosis, and a lot of the tissue in her body was dying.
“I used to wake up at 4 a.m. from all that pain all that pressure feeling that things are moving under there really deep,” said Aldaraji. “That’s when I realized the necrotic tissues were eating each other.”
She had been in Miami, Florida, with her family two weeks before. The plastic surgeon she found at Seduction Cosmetic Center is board-certified and can do what is often called “a mommy makeover.”
“I was looking for a better body, you know, especially after four kids.” She also said. Her husband says that Aldaraji knew right away that something was wrong when he woke up from surgery.
“When I go up the stairs, they wheel her over to me.” She has blood on her hand and face. That was the first time I saw something like that. “She’s not hurt or something,” he said. The family had planned to stay for five days after the surgery, but there were early signs that something wasn’t right.
The cut on her stomach was now hard and black. Says that four days after the surgery, doctors told Aldaraji that it was just dry skin and gave her an antibiotic cream to take home to Colorado.
After that, things got worse, and it was hard for her to find a doctor in the area who could help her. “I felt like no one would touch me, not even an urgent care.” What’s going on? They say it’s necrosis. “Oh, go ahead and send pictures,” they said. She said, “Never call the doctor on the phone.”
While Aldaraji says the out-of-state beauty center kept denying there was a problem, her stomach felt like it was tearing itself apart. To get help, she called Dr. Samir Hasan, who is a board-certified plastic surgeon and the owner of the Beauty Blade in Denver.
“Not everyone is just going to say, ‘yeah,’ because, one, they are afraid of liability and, two, they don’t always know what it is,” he said. He agreed to help even though he was worried.
“I thought we could help her.” She had a big cut in her stomach. She was in trouble. No one was helping her. “In general, I thought she was someone who needed help,” Dr. Hasan said. It was at the wall of her abdomen that the doctor found the necrosis. It would soon reach her innards.
“She potentially would have ended up in a hospital, I think, if she didn’t have a reconstruction and a drainage of the fluid that was pooling under the skin,” he added.
Since then, Aldaraji has had several surgeries to fix the botched tummy tuck. She has also spent endless hours trying to find a way to hold the surgery center responsible but has mostly come up empty.
“It depends on what.” Florida does not always require its doctors to have insurance that covers medical mistakes. “There is an alternative that lets doctors put some money aside in escrow in case something happens, but they only have to put a small amount of money aside,” Raj Chohan, a legal analyst for CBS Colorado, said.
Chohan says lawyers might not want to take these cases because they don’t have legal insurance, so it won’t be worth their time.
“In order to get an attorney on board in the state of Florida or anywhere else, that attorney is going to have to be convinced that the significant time and money that they are going to have to put into the case is going to be rewarded on the back end with some kind of judgement that is going to pay their bill,” Cohan said.
Still, Florida gets a lot more tourists every year who come to be beautiful. They don’t always know what they’re getting into when people from out of state fly in from all over the country to have surgery.
“Most of the people who call themselves plastic surgeons are actually cosmetic surgeons, which means they didn’t have to go to school for plastic surgery.” After taking a short training over the weekend, you could have become certified in any area of medicine. What Dr. Hasan said.
Hasan said, “People see a practice that says we’ll do your dream procedure, your mommy makeover, or your tummy tuck for $3,000, and they do 10 of them a day.” He went on to say that it’s likely that the surgeons aren’t actually doing the process on every patient who goes to these kinds of practices.
Aldaraji looked into the center online but could only find good reviews, which she now thinks may not be real. She also talked to former patients, but none of them were new.
There are times when Aldaraji has trouble lifting her kids, and she is also dealing with a new worry about her body. She wishes she had done more.
“I wake up in the middle of the night hoping it’s not ripped open again,” he said. CBS Colorado tried to get in touch with Seduction Cosmetic Center several times but couldn’t get through to anyone in charge. The last time we tried, we were told the center had nothing to say.
Aldaraji knows that she might never get justice in court, but she thinks that telling her story will scare other people and might be enough to make things change. The leader said, “Stop them from what they are doing.”
