Valerie Bertinelli recounts 'gross' breast implant complications

Valerie Bertinelli looks back on facing “gross” complications from her breast implants that she says “scared the piss out of me.” In her memoir, “Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect,” the actress says the problems began after she fell down the stairs, landed on her right breast and heard a pop — then learned an implant had ruptured.

“Six weeks later, I had the surgery. My doctor showed me the old implants. They were like ostrich eggs, hard and crusted over,” she writes. For the first two weeks she felt hopeful, but then her right breast “took on shades of green, yellow, and blue,” began to swell, she ran a fever and fluid leaked from the sutures around her nipple.

She returned to the operating room three and a half weeks after the initial procedure to remove the infected implant and the infected tissue. The doctor called the resulting collapse “cratering.” Bertinelli wrote, “Another apt word was gross. Like, really gross.

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