Woman reveals the harrowing story of how her breast implants were slowly poisoning her
When she was in her twenties, Stashia Raymer decided that she wanted to shake up her appearance a little. She was a tall, slim woman - which many people may consider to be the ideal figure. However, at 5ft 10in tall, and with C cup sized breasts, Raymer felt a little self-conscious about the proportions of her chest.
So, she decided to get implants.
With one surgical procedure, she went from having modest sized Cs to a DDD cup. And, at first, she was perfectly happy.
"I was so excited with my new body," she said in an interview with The Metro. "I was telling absolutely everyone about the implants."
Even other people's disparaging opinions couldn't put her down.
"A few people told me I didn’t need them, that I was better natural. But I did it for me, not other people. I loved the big boob look, so I figured that if I was going to go for it, I may as well go big."
However, shortly after she turned 30 - around the same time she married her husband - she began to experience abnormal symptoms.
"I felt so inflamed and puffy all the time. People must’ve thought, 'She’s married now, so she’s put on comfort weight,'" she said. "But I was really watching my diet and exercising as much as I could."
After experiencing increasing discomfort for some time, Raymer realized it was time to seek medical help.
"I went to the doctor and was advised to watch my diet – but I couldn’t see anything that would have caused this. They referred me to an endocrinologist for thyroid tests, but they all came back negative. Nobody knew what was happening to me."
But it didn't stop there. In fact, over a period of years, Raymer developed a host of new health problems that she had never experienced before.
"In around 2014, I started to get awful muscle aches for no reason. I’d have restless legs all the time, and my skin aged virtually overnight. Doctors said it was either stress or too much caffeine. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something more."
The situation peaked in 2015, just after Raymer became a mother.
"Things got really bad after I had my little girl, Jordana, who is three now. My face seemed to age overnight – I had these enormous bags, and my skin was cracked and dry," she said.
"Everyone kept saying it was because I was a new mom. But I knew it was more than that."
Raymer was becoming desperation at this point. Doctors didn't know what was wrong with her, friends believed her symptoms were all just side effects of her lifestyle, and she herself had fallen into a state of sheer hopelessness. So, with nothing left to lose, she went down a Google rabbit hole - and found herself on a forum of people who suffer with something called breast implant illness.
Simply put, the illness is caused by the body rejecting the implants as foreign bodies.
The condition is very rare, and its validity is still debated by some medical professionals. In fact, Raymer's doctors refused to believe her until she brought along evidence she found in one of the forums.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Unfortunately, it required Raymer to have her implants taken out. At that point, though, she was ready for anything.
"I did my homework and read up as much as I could, then went back to the doctor. Thankfully, he believed me and agreed it was my implants that had been doing this," she said. "Deep down I’d known that all along. My body had been fighting this foreign object for years."
"I had them removed in 2017 and couldn’t believe how different I felt immediately. The world looked so colorful and vibrant again. I hadn’t realized just how bad my brain fog was, as it’d been such a slow build-up over so long."
After years of health problems, then, Raymer was finally able to get back to a positive mental and physical state. Though it's obviously terrible that she had to go through such a traumatic phase in the first place, at least she can go on with her life knowing that all her medical problems had a root cause, and so they shouldn't return to bother her anymore.