Woman, 27, reveals how her breast implants ruined her life (2024)

• A 27-year-old YouTuber has revealed the dark side of her breast augmentation
• Karissa Pukas said it caused her to deal with adult acne, hair loss and diarrhoea
• Because of the side effects she felt like constant fatigue and severe night sweats

A woman has revealed how her breast augmentation ruined her life and left her battling for her health, as she struggled with adult acne, hair loss and severe muscle exhaustion.

Karissa Pukas, 27, who lives between Australia and Canada, shared in a YouTube video that the surgery she had in 2014 wreaked havoc on her life, leading her to have her implants removed this year.

She was struggling for months with food intolerance, foggy memory and had issues carrying conversations in ways that she never had issues with before.

'I've had on and off blurry vision and I feel like I'm an old woman. I have hip pain, back pain and digestive issues. I don't understand why I feel so old and debilitated at 26 years old,' she said in a flashback at the beginning of the video.

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'All of these things made me feel like I was living in a 90-year-old's body,' she said.

Karissa told her viewers that she felt like no one believed her but she knew there was something wrong.

She said that although shefollowed an extremely healthy lifestyle where she regularly exercised and followed a strict vegetarian diet, her body was in constant pain.

'Over and over I was being told by professionals that I'm doing the right thing and my tests were coming back normal, but I was still sick, it just didn't make any sense considering the lifestyle that I led,' she said.

The Canadian-born lifestyle blogger said she had felt like she'd been hit in the back of the head with depression, which 'was awful'.

'I started to develop a really nasty body odour and I'm not talking BO, I'm talking a metallic, acidic, stink and I couldn't understand why,' she said.

'It was predominantly coming out of my left side and I would full blown go into the shower, scrub myself until I was almost raw and spray on deodorant.'

Unfortunately no matter how hard her efforts, her boyfriend would tell her that she still smelt.

This meant she found herself being too embarrassed to leave the house, even though tests she was having done were all coming back as normal.

'I started getting really bad night sweats as well, to the point where I would be soaking the bed,' she revealed.

'I would get up in the middle of the night and put a towel down over the top of the bed to just go back to sleep because I was soaking wet and shivering.'

All of this happened in 2014, the first year of her breast augmentation surgery, and sporadic things happened as the years went on.

Soon she was dealing with having multiple periods a month, heart palpitations and waking up every night with severe hip pain.

'I was having things like sternum pain, adrenal fatigue, brain fog, my pee started smelling weird, I was having vertigo, I was having hair loss and I started having adult acne,' she said.

'I was dealing with things like my gut health and having chronic diarrhoea every single day, having joint pain and it being so unexplained.'

Although Karissa sees the connection between her health and her new breasts now, at the time none of it seemed to happen in a linear fashion.

It wasn't until she uploaded a video in April 2017 talking about her gut health that she read through the comments from her followers and someof them asked her whether she had considered breast implant illness.

As she never had any obviously physical symptoms with her breasts she left it until she started getting more comments and messages and decided to look into it.

She explained that she later learnt that when you have a breast augmentation your body has an autoimmune reaction to the foreign object and tries to protect itself.

'Your body's form of defence against that foreign invader is to build a scar capsule around the implant,' Karissa said.

'Your body doesn't recognise that as a part of itself so it begins to attack not only the implant but the capsule itself. Your body is consistently trying to fight itself.'

She also learnt that implants are made upof a variety of 'disgusting' things, such as silver, copper, iron and lead.

'I had absolutely no idea it was all connected. The first thing I was really noticing was fatigue all day every day,' Karissa said.

'With that fatigue came anxiety and depression, and I had never dealt with that in my entire life.'

When she startedpaying attention to everything, light bulbs started going off in her head and she eventually realised she wasn't the only woman with implants who had this happening.

It was after all of this research that she decided to have her implants removed.

'I didn't think that that I would ever be taking my implants out, I never considered it but the more research I've done and the more people that I've spoken to about this, all signs are pointing to me getting them out so that is what I'm doing,' she said.

'I hope by sharing my journey with you it causes you to at least think about the implications of what you're doing because when I was 22 I didn't ever expect to be doing this.'