Her entire cheekbone has disintegrated, and she has screws instead of teeth
Daniella Westbrook has revealed that, after years of drug use and botched surgery, the bones in her face are "rotting away".
Her left cheekbone is wasting away, and she's been left with screws instead of teeth, which cut her tongue as she speaks.
The nature of her surgery means some days, the 44 year old wakes up and finds the left side of her face completely sunken - other days, her cheek swells up in agony as her bones are "decaying" and "weakened".
Speaking to the Mirror Online, Westbrook claimed "I just don't
look like myself anymore".
The former cocaine addict is currently
in recovery from the drug that made her septum fall out in 2000. She claims
it’s the botched surgery she had while on a TV show in November 2015 that
left her with osteoporosis.
The condition is slowly weakening the
bones in her face and causing her left shoulder to “disintegrate”. She has
no left cheekbone and no gums on the top of her mouth. She wears a whole
denture but it’s just sitting on the roof of her mouth.
“They
need to take a piece of bone out of my skull and put a plate into my face
but they’ve got nothing to stick the plate on at the minute because the
bone's not strong enough,” she explains.
She’s currently “drinking 12 pints of milk a day” to strengthen
her bones in preparation for reconstructive surgery.
“I’ve got to
laugh or I’ll cry but it makes me so unhappy,” she reasons.
“The
thing that makes me most unhappy is everyone goes, ‘It’s coke’. I’m like,
‘Listen if it was coke, I’d be like yeah it’s coke’. But this is not my
fault, it’s down to the TV show that I’ve got bad teeth.”
The pain was so bad in January 2016 that she had to have emergency
treatment while on Celebrity Big Brother.
“The bone hadn’t closed
around the screws so they took me out of the house three times to a dentist,
which they’re not meant to, because the pain was so bad,” she says.
And
it left her so dangerously ill with septicaemia that she almost died while
staying in hospital for seven weeks.
“The blood got into where
the bone was, if it weren’t for the Royal London I’d probably be dead,” she
says.
“I did nearly die, I had two lots of IV drips in each side
and then they took all my teeth out again and gave me this denture which has
broken my heart because I didn’t need all of my teeth out in the first
place.”
Danniella has been left with crippling anxiety about her looks
that leaves her scratching her arms compulsively until they bleed.
“It
has really affected my whole life I couldn’t work the year I came out of Big
Brother. I couldn’t work at all, it makes me nervous and I’m scratching. I
get really bad anxiety,” she says.
“Some days I wake up and I’m
so swollen and other days it can look really sunken.”
She was
left needing a facelift to tighten her skin where her bones rotted away.
“It’s
getting weaker and weaker and some days the pain is unbelievable,” she
says.
Danniella is currently seeking legal action against the
show on a “no win no fee basis”. But while she waits for treatment, the
osteoporosis is spreading down her left side into her shoulder.
“I struggle with putting my arm up on this shoulder because the
joints are really bad - because the bone in this shoulder is disintegrating
because it travels through the body. I’m going to end up with arthritis
through it as well,” she says.
And her face is a constant source of anxiety as she can’t go anywhere
without people pointing and staring.
“People stare at me
constantly, but they think I can’t hear them when they’re talking about me
when I’m stood next to them in Starbucks and I’m like, ‘I can hear you,’”
she says.
“People elbow each other and say, ‘God she ain’t got no
nose at all’. So that’s why I like going to Spain to be honest because no
one gives a crap, no one knows who you are.”
Eventually, if she
can improve her bone density, Danniella will have a metal plate put in her
face.
“They can start to rebuild it but I’ll never look the same
and it could make me look not very nice, even worse than I look now,” she
admits.
“Now everyone says I need cheek filler but why do I need cheek
filler? I don’t want to put any more s*** into my face.”
Although
she’s not interested in fillers, Danniella is considering another face
lift.
“I’m gonna have another mini lift I think, but probably
next year because this [face lift] isn’t going as quick as it did before, so
it is holding this quite nicely, which is making it tighter on the bone
which is giving the bone more to cushion around."
But she insists
that, despite the pointing and staring, her nose is now stable.
“I’m
obsessed with the f***ing nose, touching it loads,” she says.
“My
kids go, ‘stop touching it, there’s nothing wrong with it’. And I’m like, ‘I
know’. It’s a fear thing - I’m just always touching it.”
