I Bitterly Regretted Having Breast Implants In My 40s. But When I Had An Operation To Remove Them, The Surgeon Did Something So Shocking I’m Still Traumatised By It, Writes NADINE DORRIES

My favourite moment in the excellent Victoria Beckham documentary is when the former Spice Girl utters the immortal line: ‘I left my boobs in Baden-Baden.’

Baden-Baden is where the England team were based during the 2006 World Cup in Germany. importantly, it’s the birthplace of the WAGs – the wives and girlfriends of the national side. The place where Posh, Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy), Coleen (later Rooney) et al in all their big-hair, high-heeled, short-skirted glory were unleashed upon the world.

Victoria is unsparingly honest about her (at the time) prominent and mildly ridiculous breast implants and how her WAG boobs had to go when she decided to make the transition from pop star to fashion designer.

Her experience struck a chord with me. I too had breast implants, then later I thought – briefly – that I’d left mine behind, too. In my case on an operating table. It was in 2013, over a decade after I’d got the implants, that I booked in to hospital to have them removed. I was 56 years old and I’d found a lump and endured troublesome investigations.

Thankfully, it turned out to be a painful but benign cyst. However, I couldn’t shake off the words of the radiographer who’d done my mammogram. ‘It’s not possible to get a full image of the breast when breast implants are in situ,’ she said. ‘They can hide a tumour… we can’t be 100 per cent certain that there isn’t anything there.’

That was it. I wanted them out. A surgeon was recommended and I went for an initial consultation. He examined me and I told him what I wanted and why.

He snorted, wrenched his eyes from my breasts and, peering over his glasses, said sneeringly: ‘I’ve never had a woman who told me the implants I gave her were too big – and you want yours taken out? Really?’

I didn’t like him or his affected plummy accent one little bit. I had battled overly privileged men with appalling manners like him all my life and here I was, naked to the waist, as he poked his index fingers into my breasts and patronised me. I took a deep breath and said that was exactly what I wanted. I had come to realise that my natural breasts had been perfect for me.

I wanted them back. I’d made a huge mistake having implants in the first place. They had become a daily reminder of a time when I had felt desperately inadequate. Now I wanted rid.

I left the appointment far from happy. He wasn’t the kind of doctor anyone would warm to. He obviously had some kind of God complex and had confused cosmetic surgery with saving lives.

But I was too busy to find another surgeon. I went ahead. How hard could it be? A simple incision, whip the D-cup implants out, stitch me back up. In and out in a day and I would get back to my crazy busy life.

When the day arrived, I checked in to the hospital and waited for the routine pre-op chat with my surgeon. But he didn’t turn up, which I thought was odd. When I woke from the general anaesthetic, however, he was there, stooped down by the bed.

In a voice laced with malice, he whispered: ‘If I’d done what you asked me to do, your breasts would have looked like rocks in socks. I’ve put a pair back in.’

Rocks in socks?

When I was fully conscious, I thought I had dreamed the whole thing. My hand slowly crept up to my chest. It was no dream. There were large dressings in place. He had indeed taken the old implants out and put new implants in. I had paid a great deal of money and endured a general anaesthetic and invasive surgery only to have my express wishes ignored. I cannot begin to describe how I felt. Abused, horrified and violated doesn’t cover it.

An ageing, pompous man in a white coat had taken control of my body when I was unconscious and done what he wanted, not what I had asked for, when I was at my most vulnerable and without my consent. I lay in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. I was numb with shock. I couldn’t bring myself to speak about what had happened to me even to the kind friend who’d accompanied me to the hospital.

I acted as though it wasn’t a big deal, but I was mortified. I had gone in a 36D and come out the same size. That was not supposed to have happened.

How had I ignored my own instincts about this man?

A few days later, I telephoned the hospital and explained my concerns and how confused I was.

How had this been allowed to happen? I wasn’t yet angry. I was still in shock. The chief executive called me back, apologised profusely and sent me an enormous bunch of flowers with a very nice card. She explained that a paragraph in the consent form I had signed enabled the doctor to override my instructions if he felt that I was being, in effect, unreasonable in the choice I had made. As a former nurse, I knew that if an emergency arises during surgery, a doctor can do whatever is required to save someone’s life, even if that meant carrying out procedures for which he or she had no consent from the patient.

But this wasn’t the case with me. This was a doctor who had unilaterally – arrogantly – made a decision about my body.

If I were to give him the benefit of the doubt, if he thought my breasts really would look like ‘rocks in socks’ post-surgery, why didn’t he say so during the initial consultation? Why did he wait to impose his preference on my anaesthetised body?

What made all of this so much worse was my bitter regret at ever having implants in the first place. It’s no exaggeration to say that there was not a single day when I hadn’t chastised myself for them. I had come to loathe them.

Post-op, family and everyday life had come at me fast and I never sought redress. I didn’t want to make a fuss.

Only the friend who’d been at the hospital and close family knew. Even with them, I couldn’t articulate how upset I was, so I just put my best face on and moved forward with this new pair of alien implants in my body that I hated even more than the first set. They were a constant reminder of the surgeon, his abuse of power and of why I’d had implants in the first place.

In her documentary, Victoria Beckham talks of her battles from childhood onwards with low self-confidence and body image.

I can relate to that, albeit for different reasons. When you grow up as the poorest child in a poor community, you carry a burden of shame and constant anxiety that never leaves you.

I didn’t understand what the man behind the wooden desk was saying to my mother when she took us to the rent office – meeting the payments was a weekly challenge – but I recognised the fleeting look he gave my little brother and me. It was one of pity.

I vowed that my children wouldn’t go hungry or have to borrow shoes to go to school or worry about where the next meal was coming from.

And I fulfilled that vow through sheer grit and hard work. The day I sold the business I had started from scratch was the day I knew I had reached my goal. I had everything I had ever wanted and dreamed of – or I thought I had.

It was when I was trying to become an MP that I realised hard work and success don’t negate deep-rooted insecurities.

It doesn’t give you the innate confidence that people from more privileged backgrounds have. And suddenly, I was surrounded by those people, a new world full of public school-educated men and women where I was, once again, the odd one out.

I might drive a brand new Range Rover, live in a beautiful house, have built and sold a business, but I hadn’t been to university or joined a debating society. I felt like I was about to drown.

It was another female candidate I met on the MP selection circuit who told me she had breast implants. ‘You need everything you haven’t got in this game,’ she told me. That got me thinking.

I could give you a list of the number of women MPs who have them – although of course I never would. But it’s not only celebrities who feel they need the extra confidence they can get from cosmetic surgery. As Botox and fillers are all too common today, in the 1990s it was implants and, in the end, I succumbed. I handed over £5,000, booked myself in – and returned home in sheer agony.

I could only sleep upright and on that first night, my husband Paul cried. He couldn’t bear to see me in such pain and although he didn’t voice it, I could tell he hated what I had done to myself.

So did I. I realised that it took a special kind of low self-esteem and self-loathing to put yourself in such a position. A special lack of self-belief. All my life to that point, I had never thought I was good enough for anything because I was conditioned that way. I had thought that working seven days a week for years to achieve success and all the material life goals that came with it would bury all of that. I was wrong.

It was only a week or so after that first breast implant op that I began to experience stiff joints. It started in my fingers and toes, then spread to my hips. I wondered if the implants were the cause. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence.

I had always been fit and yet now, if I was in the car for more than an hour, I couldn’t walk properly afterwards. I took anti-inflammatories and found them transformative. Like my joints had been oiled.

I knew in my heart that there must be a link to the implants – an inflammatory reaction perhaps to the silicone in the implants – and that fast became another reason why I wanted them removed.

So exactly two weeks ago today, it finally happened. I went through the implant removal process again – only this time with a doctor I trusted absolutely.

I am on a ‘Cotswold Ladies’ WhatsApp group in my area and the name Charlie Chan at a Cheltenham hospital pops up over and over for everything breast related. I plucked up the courage to go to see him.

As he came out of his room to call me in, he spotted another patient in the waiting room, there to see someone else. He went straight over and gave her a hug. I could tell she was very poorly and his warm concern impressed me.

‘He’s like that,’ said the receptionist, who had noticed me watching. ‘Every patient thinks they are Charlie’s only patient. He knows where they’ve been on holiday, the name of their children. He genuinely really cares.’

Tears stung my eyes. I told Charlie my story and he was forthright in his response. ‘That was abuse,’ he said simply. He understood and I knew I was going to be okay. Finally, after 24 years, I am implant free and it is an utter relief. (And my natural breasts don’t look like ‘rocks in socks’ at all.)

The real me is back. I feel better in myself, happier and more energetic than I have ever been. I am convinced there was a link between the joint inflammation and the implants. I am also reassured that any mammogram I have in the future will be more accurate.

Looking back at the old me, the one who thought having breast implants would give her the confidence she lacked, makes me feel sad. However, I’ve learned a very valuable lesson the hard way.

When it comes to your body, don’t be me. Be guided by your instincts. You will always be right.