A man who was conscious about his looks tragically died after plastic surgery, with CCTV revealing the horrifying truth.
Kwon Dae-hee, a 24-year-old university student from South Korea, paid 6.5 million Won (about £3,800) for a surgical procedure to reshape his chin and make him look like a K-pop star.
Sadly, he died during surgery.
After declaring Kwon brain-dead, hospital officials telephoned his brother, Kwon Tae-hoon, and said that he was “in hospital, but his condition was ’not that serious’.”
When Kwon’s family arrived and found him dead, his mother, Lee Na Geum, requested the CCTV footage of the theatre where her son’s surgery was performed and the plastic surgeon handed it over.
The footage showed nurses mopping blood from the floor 13 times during the three-hour operation.
Stephanie Soo, from the Rotten Mango podcast, explained that “an average 24-year-old 150lb male has about one-and-a-half gallons of blood in his body, and he had lost two-thirds of that.”
Kwon’s mother took the CCTV footage home and watched it several times.
Stephanie said. “She just knew that something in that footage was going to be important. She snatched it right up, went home and watched it 500 times. She sat there writing down every millisecond and logging down what happened: time-stamping everything.”
The footage showed that the top plastic surgeon that Kwon had trusted to remodel his face left the operating theatre, roughly 60 minutes into the procedure. A second doctor, a recently-graduated general doctor who did not have a plastic surgery licence, was left to finish the operation.
“Ghost doctors” are commonly employed in plastic surgery.
“When the patient is knocked out on the operating table they’ll start the procedure, slip away, and a ghost doctor will come in and do most of the work,” Stephanie explained.
“While the ghost doctor is operating on Patient A, the main famous surgeon goes to Patient B and starts the whole process over again. And then on to Patients C and to D. They can do a bajillion surgeries a day, and then when it’s all done the ghost doctor will f*** off like a ghost that never existed. They’ll never be listed on the records.”
Kwon’s brother said: “My brother trusted in that main doctor, and that’s why he decided to be operated on there.”
Kwon during his mandatory military service
But instead, for two hours he had been in the care of a “ghost doctor,” a less-qualified surgeon who had stepped in to help keep costs down, and profits high.
After the surgery, the anaesthetist and both doctors went home, leaving nurses in charge as Kwon continued to lose massive amounts of blood.
Stephanie continued: “At the end of the plastic surgery, he was left on the operating table in the operating room with a nurse – actually it wasn’t even a nurse it was a nursing assistant.
“He’s under anaesthesia, he hasn’t woken up, yet all the other surgeons they have left and a few nurses are in and out of the room but nobody’s checking his vitals.
“The nurse that’s sitting in that room is on her phone, she’s checking her makeup she’s texting people… she literally just could not care at all.”
On a couple of occasions, the CCTV shows the nursing assistant looking up in response to the sound of blood dropping out of the patient, and just grabbing a mop and clearing it up.
“I don’t think this ghost doctor checked how much blood my son lost,” the bereaved mother, Lee, said.
Kwon and his mother
“I was so angry at that fact. Had just one of the three doctors checked how much he bled, but no one did.”
Kwon’s family have been awarded 430 million won (£265,000) in damages against the clinic.
The surgeon in the case has been sentenced to three years of prison for involuntary manslaughter.
