The Worst Botched Surgeries and Medical Procedures

Concrete Butt Implants, 2013

As a general rule, you should never accept surgical procedures from anybody named "Pebbelz Da Model." The big-bootied video vixen has appeared in a number of clips for rap artists twerking her hind end, but when an Atlanta woman named Karima Gordon came to her for advice on enlarging her rear end, Pebbelz (real name Natasha Stewart) and a friend charged her an unspecified sum of money and then injected her with a solution of cement. The toxic mixture entered the patient's bloodstream and killed her. Pebbelz was arrested and is slated to stand trial in June.

Feeding Tube in Lungs, 2009

The inside of the human body is a complicated place, with tubes and pathways all over. Doctors are human, too, and they can get lost in there. When Eugene Riggs, Jr. went into the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio complaining of a stomach ache, doctors diagnosed him with diverticulitis and put a feeding tube down his throat to ensure he received adequate nutrition. Unfortunately, the tube didn't make it to his digestive tract - instead, it was inserted in his right lung, where it spent the next nine hours filling it up with pink, slimy fluid. Riggs died four months later.

Cooking Oil Face Injection, 2013

Here's another case where a patient took matters into her own hands, with disastrous results. Hang Mioku is a South Korean woman who is obsessed with plastic surgery. She had her first procedure at 28 and proceeded to undergo multiple treatments for softer, smoother skin until she ran out of money in 2013. She didn't stop, though. First, Mioku bought black-market silicone and started injecting it into her face, and then when she couldn't find any more she resorted to shooting up with ordinary cooking oil. The bizarre beauty treatment left her face and head grotesquely swollen and hideous.

Chopped-Up Penis, 2004

We give doctors a tremendous amount of trust. When we're under the anesthetic, they could do just about anything to our sleeping bodies and we'd never be the wiser. Well, not in the case of Romanian construction worker Nelu Radonescu. Suffering from a testicular malformation, he went to Bucharest's Panduri Urology Hospital for surgery from veteran doctor Naum Ciomu. The operation went normally until Dr. Ciomu accidentally nicked Radonescu's urinary channel. Instead of working to fix it, the demented doctor freaked out, cut his patient's entire penis off, chopped it into three pieces and ran out of the operating room, leaving his surgical team frantically trying (and failing) to save Radonescu's unit.

Iranian Leg Lengthening, 2012

"Medical tourism" is a growing industry, where people looking for procedures that haven't been approved in their native country - or are too expensive there - travel abroad for surgery. For an American man who requested to use a pseudonym when he talked to the media, that procedure was "leg lengthening." With an adult height of just five foot six, the man traveled to a clinic in Iran that promised to add six inches to his stature. The procedure worked, but subsequent X-rays revealed several of the nails the Iranian doctors had put in had already snapped, requiring him to have additional agonizing surgeries just to walk.

Wrong Side Craniotomy, 2013

Brain surgery is one of the most difficult medical procedures attempted today. The inner workings of our heads are still barely understood, even with centuries of research behind it, and the smallest mistake can be disastrous. Take the case of Regina Taylor, who went into the SSM St. Claire Health Care Center in St. Louis for a left-sided craniotomy bypass to reduce her risk of future strokes. The surgeon, Dr. Armond Levy, did the procedure on the right side of her brain instead, leaving her a vegetable unable to care for herself.

Wrong Leg Amputated, 1995

Amputation is one of the most intense procedures a doctor can do, a final solution to medical problems too tough to tackle. When diabetic Willie King went into Tampa's University Community Hospital to have his heavily diseased leg amputated, the surgeon read the leg to be cut from the hospital's computer system and double-checked it with the operating schedule. Unfortunately, both were wrong and the doctor only realized it when he had almost completely cut through the patient's healthy leg. Both legs had to be amputated as a result, and King won more than a million dollars in court.

Wrong Heart and Lung Transplants, 2003

Here's a particularly heartbreaking story of surgical disaster. Jesica Santillan was a 17-year-old Mexican immigrant who had come to the United States in pursuit of a cure for the heart and lung disorder that doctors in her native country could do nothing about. At Duke University Medical Center, she qualified for a rare and high-risk transplant where a new set of lungs and a new heart would be implanted in her all at once. Unfortunately, tragedy struck when the blood type of the donor wasn't matched with Santillan, and her body rejected the new organs immediately. They managed to remove the heart and lungs and stabilize her, but she died just weeks later.