Are Tighter Butt Cheeks or Bigger Breasts Worth Dying For?

I am extremely saddened to see that a beautiful woman just died needlessly in search of something unobtainable - physical perfection in the face of aging. A woman named Solange Magnano - a model and former Miss Argentina - died from complications of cosmetic surgery. She was undergoing buttock surgery - yes, she was having surgery at age 38 to give herself either firmer or perkier or whatever buttocks. Having seen photos of the woman, I cannot imagine why she would have felt the need to do anything to alter her appearance - she was gorgeous. However, she felt that her life was worth so little that she was willing to risk it all for tighter butt cheeks. I doubt that she consciously thought about it in those terms, but the truth is that every person (and it's mostly women) who undergoes any type of cosmetic surgery is risking their life in order to alter their appearance. Not to cure a disease, or make them happier, or healthier, but to make them look different.

Every time a person has anesthesia (and I'm talking both general anesthesia where you are put into a drug-induced coma and no longer breathe on your own, and regional anesthesia where you might have a spinal block but are still awake) there is a risk of death. The risk of death I am referring to is the risk that comes just because you are undergoing anesthesia. I am not including the risk that something goes horribly wrong during the surgery and you bleed to death, or you get an infection after and die from that, or you develop a blood clot that goes to your lungs and kills you in the days to weeks after the surgery. I am talking about the risk of death that happens if you just have anesthesia, and don't even have a surgery done (if that were a possibility). And the risk of death isn't miniscule. We aren't talking about a one in a million chance of dying here. In looking at all the current data available now, including reviews of anesthesia deaths found in the literature and hospital reporting in the past decade (and this is really tough stuff to weed through) most educated and reasonable guesses put the risk of death at one in 10,000 conservatively.

So of all the people that undergo any surgery that requires anesthesia, about one person out of every 10,000 will die just because they had anesthesia. Remember, this does NOT include deaths related to the surgery itself like bleeding or infection or blood clots. Now, most studies suggest that people who are unhealthy, or need emergency surgery, are more likely to die from anesthesia. That would make sense. And the very young (i.e., infants) or the very old are also higher risk. But that's not the whole story - remember, the one in 10,000 deaths refer only to those people who died from the actual anesthesia.

In a recent review of mortality from cosmetic surgeries in the U.S. the author (himself an cosmetic or plastic surgeon) concluded that the death rate from breast implant surgery in Los Angeles in the past decade was at least one in 6,000, and possibly as frequent as one in 3,000. He also noted that at least one woman in six has a significant complication from her surgery, like infection, abnormal scarring (like the kind that gives the woman rock hard breasts) or blood clots in the breast tissue.

I don't know about most people, but when it's laid out in those terms (a one in 6,000 chance of dying just to get bigger boobs for your guy (or girl) to be proud of, or in the vain hope that altering your outward physical appearance will in any way make you happier) those sound like really shitty odds. It's about the same chance that you will die in a car accident in the next year. Your odds of dying during a one hour plane flight are less than 1 in 1,000,000. And your odds of winning the state lottery? 1 in 18,000,000 at best. It seems to me that you would be much better off spending your money (because those new breasts or buttocks aren't covered by insurance) on a great therapist who can help you work through why you hate your body so much that you are willing to risk death to change it.