Krystal Reilly is a 30-year-old woman living in Austin, Texas. Three years ago, after the birth of her first daughter, she decided to get a Brazilian butt lift. With an estimated death rate of 1 in every 3,000 patients, BBLs have the highest known mortality rate of any procedure, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, but Krystal thought she’d done all her research. The experience quickly turned into her worst nightmare.
This is her story—part of our RealSelf Verified campaign to offer consumers greater transparency into provider qualifications—as told to Alix Tunell and edited for length and clarity.
I’ve always been flat on the top and bottom and never felt fully comfortable in my skin. As I got older, I considered getting a breast augmentation, but the thought of going under general anesthesia was terrifying to me—I have anxiety and dying is one of my biggest fears, so being put to sleep was just never a risk I wanted to take. But after having my first daughter at 27, my body changed and I decided I really wanted liposuction. In the process of researching it, I learned that you can do a fat transfer, which is where they take the fat out of your stomach, back, or flanks and inject it into another area, usually your butt. I had never heard about Brazilian butt lifts or thought about having one until that moment—it just seemed like a nice perk of liposuction.
Why I ultimately decided to get a Brazilian butt lift
I never came across any information about the risk of fat embolisms and all the deaths resulting from BBLs. The worst-case scenario seemed to be getting an infection that could be easily cleared with antibiotics. Everything I found led me to believe this was a safe procedure.
RealSelf was my main source in my search for a doctor, but my options were limited because I wanted to do this under local anesthesia only. I was drawn to Beleza MedSpa because it offered what was described as an “advanced awake method” and had plenty of five-star reviews and the procedure, according to Beleza, was always done by a board-certified plastic surgeon. It’s common in Austin for board-certified doctors to also have medical spas, so that didn’t stand out as a red flag.
I went in for a consultation and met with a plastic surgeon named Dr. David Dellinger, who told me I’d need to gain 15 pounds before the surgery, in order to have enough fat to work with. I confirmed he was board-certified through the registry and felt good about him. But Beleza had some shady sales tactics that rubbed me the wrong way—there was a special going on that month, for $1,000 off the procedure, but then the original price was inflated, so there was no discount—and I decided to look around for other places.
Ultimately, I couldn’t find anyone else willing to do the surgery under local anesthesia and Beleza had really sold me on how well-trained the doctors were in the awake method, so I called to book the BBL. When I did, I was told that Dr. Dellinger was no longer working there—but there was a great new doctor who could see me. Here’s where I admittedly made a mistake: Because the website explicitly said only board-certified surgeons (which was misleading and led me to believe they meant board-certified plastic surgeons) to perform the surgery and I had confirmed Dr. Dellinger was a board-certified plastic surgeon, I figured Dr. Lawrence Broder was also, without looking further into his credentials.
When I met with Dr. Broder, he wore a lab coat that had his name, with “plastic surgeon” under it. I remember clearly making that connection. He also told me he was a veteran, which is something I respect and associate with honesty, loyalty, and ethics. Then he told me how pain-free the procedure was, thanks to the advanced technology used, and noted that most patients nap during it. He also didn’t tell me to gain 15 pounds, which I was happy about, and he had availability in the next couple of weeks. So that’s how I ended up in Dr. Broder’s hands. [Editor’s note: Beleza MedSpa is now Beleza Surgery, and head plastic surgeon Dr. Staci Hix-Hernandez has stated that Dr. Lawrence Broder has not seen a patient at the practice since January 2018.]
My BBL experience
The day of my surgery, I took the Ativan [an anxiety-relief medication] he prescribed me and ordered a Lyft to Beleza. I gave a urine sample to test for pregnancy when I got there and then was given more Ativan. I was supposed to go into the operating room at 11 a.m., but that hour came and went. Every time a nurse came to check on me, they were surprised by how awake I was and fed me more Ativan. It was just Ativan after Ativan, until they finally brought me to Dr. Broder. As he circled my body with a marker and I held a straight conversation with him, he looked over at the nurse and I saw concern in his face as he made a comment that I was too “with it.” I was trying to show him my wish pictures and talk to him about what I wanted, and he seemed very irritated with me, like he was rushing to get started. It was at that point that I started to feel really uneasy.
I lay down on the table and he rubbed iodine all over my stomach, then he got this little hole-puncher device and started to make holes in my skin for the liposuction cannula. There was no numbing at all as he literally punctured holes the size of a pencil eraser in my stomach. When he was done, he injected lidocaine. After letting it sit for awhile, he started poking me with his finger and asking if I could feel anything. I said it was sort of numb, but not completely, so he injected more. Then he got started with the liposuction—and I can’t even describe the immediate pain I felt, it was so horrific. I could feel everything, so I was holding my breath, trying to stay calm, squeezing the nurses’ hands. It was like he was whacking my ribs with a metal rod, and I told him I needed more numbing, I couldn’t take the pain. That seemed to really frustrate him, and I remember thinking, This isn’t normal—how could anyone sleep through this? It felt like someone had pounded out the area between my ribs and belly button, but I also noticed he hadn’t really touched my lower stomach.
When that was over, I was told to flip onto my stomach for the fat injections in my butt. He injected lidocaine there and then handed me stress balls. Stress balls! I was terrified already, and then it was, “On the count of 1, 2, 3…” and he’d jam the fat in, over and over. I was crying because of the pain, which irritated him, but when I glanced up at one of the nurses, her face said it all: She looked just as traumatized as I was and appeared to be holding back tears. It was obvious that this wasn’t normal.
Eventually, it was over—and I went into a recovery room to get bandaged up. That same nurse asked who was picking me up, and I said I was just going to take a Lyft, since I lived so close. She looked worried and said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea, I don’t think you’re safe,” and insisted on driving me home. She was new to Beleza, and I think she felt a lot of guilt for what she had just witnessed.
I got home and went straight to the mirror, where I saw absolutely no difference. From what I’d read online, everyone seemed to have pretty instant results; if anything, I should have looked a lot bigger due to swelling. I gave it a couple of days, at which point I got this really hot, painful, lumpy feeling in both of my butt cheeks. There were big bumps, and whenever I pressed them, pain shot through the entire side. It turned out that in addition to having zero results, I also had an infection in both sides. But Dr. Broder completely dismissed my concerns when I went in and just kept telling me how sexy my body looked and promised that I was going to love the results. Meanwhile, my stomach and back were uneven, with pockets of fat he had totally skipped over, and my butt was the exact same size.
He showed me the before and after photos and tried to convince me how much bigger my butt was, and I couldn’t tell if he was kidding—there was really no difference whatsoever. He just kept repeating how sexy I was, like this was all in my head and I just needed a man’s validation. It was so condescending.
At another follow-up appointment, I asked to see my file, because I wanted to know how many ccs of fat had been taken out. On RealSelf, women always mention this information, so I had a good idea of what the normal range was. He wouldn’t let me see my file and rushed out with it, saying he was late for a surgery. So I asked another staff member and found out that he’d injected about half the normal amount for someone with my body type.
At this point, I was angry enough to write a review on RealSelf. After it went up, he sent me a private message, asking if I’d post the photos with my review. I did—and sure enough, RealSelf members were enraged on my behalf and left so many nasty comments. He wrote me again and said that I was damaging his business. I explained that what he did to me was even more damaging and I was only telling the truth. That’s when I clicked over to his page on RealSelf for the first time—I’d only been looking on Beleza’s—and found out the scariest thing: he was a family practitioner, not a plastic surgeon.
I was in complete shock. I didn’t even know that was legal. I thought you had to be either a board-certified plastic surgeon or a plastic surgeon—it didn’t even cross my mind that you could perform plastic surgery otherwise. Once I found that out, everything spiraled. I learned he’d had a family practice in another city that was shut down, and I found all these horrible reviews on Yelp, under the “reviews that are not currently recommended” section at the bottom. That’s where all the worst ones get filtered into, usually because the users who post them aren’t super-active; most people don’t know the section exists.
As I spoke out more and more, I started getting private messages from his employees, saying that I was far from the only one with a bad experience and confirming that he had no idea what he was doing. They said they couldn’t do anything, because he’d made them sign NDAs and intimidated them with the threat of legal action—everyone was scared of him and begged me not to expose their names.
Then, about a month later, I found out I was pregnant. Here’s the thing: I was far enough along that I would have been pregnant the day of my surgery, when I took the urine test. I thought back to how I was supposed to be in surgery at 11 but didn’t go in until 1. I remembered how gentle he was around my lower stomach—he basically avoided it completely. Did my pregnancy test come up positive, and he had to make the decision to send me home and lose the money or just move forward carefully? I don’t have proof, so I can’t say for sure; but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
I filed a complaint with the Texas Medical Board, alleging that he’d posed as a plastic surgeon, since it was written on his coat and the website said only board-certified surgeons (which, again, I thought meant board-certified plastic surgeons) perform the procedure. Their response was that my unhappiness with the outcome didn’t qualify as malpractice or cause of damage on his part. They didn’t take into consideration that his credentials weren’t what he said they were and that I would never have gone to a family physician. Meanwhile, most of my reviews were getting deleted from sites for “violating community standards,” which was so infuriating. I was being silenced from all angles.
One day, while watching the news, a story came on about how a woman had died under his care. I couldn’t stop thinking about how, if she had seen my reviews that kept getting deleted or hidden, maybe she would have reconsidered. I initially wanted to keep my surgery somewhat private, but after everything that happened, I’m no longer afraid to be an advocate.
Why I share my BBL experience
Last year, at a South by Southwest panel hosted by RealSelf, I stood up and shared my story during the Q&A portion. I said that had it not been for the site, I wouldn’t have found out Dr. Broder wasn’t a plastic surgeon. The team thanked me and said that stories like mine are the reason they’re working harder than ever to make sure reviews are legitimate and truthful and doctors’ credentials are what they claim.
Related: RealSelf Verified: One Blue Checkmark, 7 Problems Solved
This entire experience has taught me a lot about the loopholes in the law and how aware consumers need to be.
A week ago, Dr. Broder responded to my year-old Yelp review, saying that nothing I’d written was true. I went to RealSelf to take a screenshot of a message he’d sent me there, in which he’d apologized and said he wanted to address my concerns. When I got to his profile, I saw that it was marked “license disciplinary action,” so I hope he’s under investigation and can’t hurt anyone else. We need to change how easy it is to manipulate patients. I don’t know if my review would have prevented the young woman’s death, but I know that if I had read it, I never, in a million years, would have gone there.
