SOHO

Article Magazine SOHO, Edition 84/April 2007 - "Marylin Patiño with her breasts operated", page 241
Photographies: PIZARRO © 2007

Marilyn Patiño getting a disoperation

By GUSTAVO BOLÍVAR

As Catalina, the central character in “Sin tetas no hay paraíso”, Marilyn grew up noticing that women who had big breast were doing better than the ones with small breast. Obviously, this was a very subjective perception to see reality. That led herself unconsciously with her wish of being someone in life.

“I dreamed of being a singer, model, TV host or actress”. She knew that in order to get it, she should get a definite change to her clumsy shape without protuberances.”I had the talent, the willing to do it, a pretty face and nice buttocks. But I lack something that famous people had a lot”, she says with nostalgia accent and makes it clear that is about her body, more exactly her breast.

After saving money during months while she was working, even extra hours and Sundays, in a clothe store in Cali, she could get the two million pesos that the prosthesis cost. By that time she was 16 and according to her “The age when the human stupidity reaches its maximum expression. The age when girls do not know what we want and many times we wish what is least convenient, because we are not conscious at all. We are sponges that absorb the fashion wings and the necessity to call the attention and be important”.

The time agrees with her and also disagrees. It agrees because after getting silicones inserted in her breast she got many offers to model, registrations in beauty contests and even to be on TV. And it disagrees because according to her words “I started to understand that being natural and talent is more important than breast implants”.

But, why did she get that radical way of thinking? According to her, because of the doubts she got filming in Pereira “Sin tetas no hay paraiso”. “I felt very sad seeing so many girls interested in getting big breast, thinking that in this way they could assure their future”, she says with sadness.

“It is the blame of that damned legacy that the drug traffickers who with their bad example invite us to get rich fast and without any effort. It is the blame of the media that with their bombardment of men and women with beautiful appearance show to girls with little discernment and character that in order to have success you must be pretty and hot, without mattering talent. Without mentioning more guilty people, it is a fact that youth, especially in popular neighborhoods, there is a crazy race to find success through delicious parts of the body to offer”.

It is a relief for the people who think that the passport to go to paradise is not gotten in the operating room. The life of Catalina Santana, the main character of “Sin tetas no hay paraiso”, changed forever the way of thinking about the topic of vanity of the teenagers from many countries. This axiom says that without one thing you cannot get the other which ended up into the topic of many caricatures and articles of the main newspapers and magazines around the world, and the word “tetas” as Maria Isabel Rueda said in an article of the magazine “Semana” is maybe the most mentioned in the year 2006. As much as “Proceso 8000” in the middle of the 90s, “Clearance zone” at the end of the same decade, “Democratic security” at the beginning of the millennium, and “Parapolitica” currently.

From Fiction to Reality

When I decided to write “Sin tetas no hay paraiso”, I get together with many surgeons to be told what was mammoplasty of augmentation without even imagine that time later I had to see a similar operation, and that that surgery was not about implanting a prosthesis of silicone in the breast of a woman but removing it. A disoperation. The disoperation of Marilyn Patino.

She tells me that had acted as Paola, one of the friends of the main character who after the scattering of the “traquetos” fell into the denigrating profession of cabaret prostitute, changed her way of thinking. She says that she was really scared when in that park of the neighborhood Leningrado II in Pereira, where most of the serie was filmed, children got close to her (sometimes pre-pubescent) to ask her questions. The same sensation I experimented, four years ago, when in the same city Catalina got close to me to ask me what she should do to be an actress. I answered to her what I say to everyone “You have to study and be prepared”. She replied to me that she was not going to study because education was not good for anything, making me to understand that big breast open more doors than a diploma. It is worrying that a 14 year old girl was thinking about education in that way and it was even more worrying that she had such a coherent speech: “my sister finished her high school and is watching the dishes in a restaurant and my friends who dropped out school are very good. They already have motorcycle, van and their houses are the nicest”.

It does not matter if the soap opera was good or bad, the thing is that it really impacted, and it generated a moral and ethical debate about aesthetic surgeries and the horrible result they cause when it is mixed vanity and ambition. One of the victims of this debate was Marilyn.

She told me that making that decision was not easy. Before doing it, there was an incredible amount of voices in her head, some justifying “yes” and others in favor of “no”, “If you get an operation, the doors will be closed” some said, “If you had your prosthesis removed you would be the same one again” others said, “If you leaved them on, you are going to be a clone as the others”. “If you have them taken out, the next man that arrives to your life will do it for the way you see things and the charm of your intelligence, or attracted by the rest of your natural beauty”. The scale leaned towards wisdom, and Marilyn decided one day to have her prosthesis, that she had got seven years ago removed, when Colombia just had started to be the worldwide paradise of aesthetical surgeries.

That is why was weird to find, in the middle of this torrent of vain sick people and sometimes ambitious who were walking on the path of obsessive aesthetic to get wealth and fame, a woman who walks against this whims of crowds. Somebody willing to have her prosthesis (that many wished) taken out. All of this with the purpose of finding herself and showing to the world and the girls of her generation that: “Sin tetas no hay paraiso”.

She made this decision because she was mortified by the badgering of men who courted her and the excessive interest of the girls looking for “Paradise”. For this reason, and being sure that she had rushed years ago, one day she decided to go to a surgeon to get all information related to her disoperation.

With all medical arguments added to all her necessities of freedom and mental tranquility, she made the decision of giving back to her breast her natural size. It was not easy to do something like this. It was necessary to be brave and get some aesthetic risks. She was willing to continue conquering the world without her appreciated breast size 34B that were not the same she had put in her adolescence, and were not the same because those in that time were too big. According to her own version, the surgeon put on her disproportionate prosthesis size 36. The first reduction caused on her a sinmastia (breaking of the mayor pectoral muscle that produces the detachment of the skin of the breastbone, therefore the prosthesis get together generating a phenomenon called twin breast).

This accumulation of silicone in the center of her breast made her feel ashamed, because she always wanted to have her breast look natural. For this reason, she had them changed for the ones she was going to have removed, wishing to be forever and hoping that nobody would know about it.

She told me that one day. I told her that that was very sensible, but I advised her to have it to be known by people. I suggested to her not to waste this great opportunity to take advantage of this and set a new fashion, set a tendency, getting operated in an anonymous way without many people knowing her decision and the reason of it. I thought this was a waste to do it in a quiet way, as if this step was not as important as the man setting his foot on the moon. I saw it this way.

After many debates, Marilyn decided to make public her feat. To save some stories, it had such welcome in the magazine that, here we are in her hands after working for seven moths this chronic.

The genesis of this transformation

The first thing they recommended us was to leave a graphic testimony of the feat and Marilyn accepted. A team of photographers led by Pizarro moved to Cartagena where the last photos of the actress showing her breast with silicone were taken.

When they showed me the photos, I noticed on her a sadness accent and I asked her if that was because she felt sorry about taking them out. She told me about the nostalgia she felt for not being the so often shined and filmed star any longer, the ex “Chica Med”, the actress of “Me amaras bajo la lluvia”, “Juego limpio”, the acclaimed model and the co-protagonist of “Sin tetas no hay paraiso” to be just a normal woman who surely was not going to get any advertisement contracts and roles on TV. Because this decision did not have just aesthetic implications, it was her job and her fame at risk, the love of her boyfriend of that time and even her mood. This feat is about her courage to face all those threats.

There came the time of the surgery. At the entrance of the clinic were: Roberto Africano, the photographer of SoHo; Juanita Ochoa, the producer; Marilyn and me with the surgeon in charge of changing her prosthesis for smaller ones. This was a man from the coast who was very talkative, cheerful, nice, and less transcendental that I imagined. This surgeon made his patient get in his doctor’s office and telling some jokes got her not feel nervous and take off her blouse and bra. She was a little intimidated by our presence, but told him that it was necessary to do it.

It was visible that her left breast was more flat than the right one. The doctor warned about this without knowing that later he would find the cause. Then, he started to draw, with a black ink marker, a circle around the areola that surrounds the nipple of the patient and another circle four centimeters above the circle that surrounds the areola. Nobody, not the doctor himself knew that he was cutting too much tissue. We did not have to know about this either.

Partial Death

There inside nothing was different. After the anesthesia, the first thing that Blanchar did was to set inside an orotraqueal tube to keep straight the position of the patient’s head during the operation (this strange word is not my business). After, and while asked his assistant to play some music, he took the ink marker and started to draw around the edge of the areola with a mould that look like a bottle glass lid. While this was happening the artificial breathing operator (a very sophisticated device full of graphics and alarms showed the cardiac frequency which was oscillating between 77 and 44 beatings for an average of 58 palpitations by minute, and the oxygen saturation was indicating a CO2 of 22 (no idea what this figure means). A medium recorder started to play Joe Arroyo’s music which Dr. Blanchar had asked for.

It is a pity that there is not “vallenato”, whispered the surgeon while still drawing the areola of the nipple. Nobody answered anything.

Then, he drew another circle four centimeters outside of the nipple and asked for a couple of syringes, that according to Celmira, the equipment operator, had xilocaine and adrenaline which mission was to avoid the patient’s bleeding. My first impression was when the surgeon started pulling the patient’s nipples, without exaggerating it looked like a vulture pulling an inert meat. After, he started to inject them with the liquid that was inside the syringes in different parts and punching with unnecessary frequency.

“This is done to avoid the bleeding”, he said to apologize about his rudeness. But, he was right because after I asked different surgeons about it and the majority agreed that that was a common procedure.

The disoperation starts

We meet our expectations. Blanchar started to trace with his knife the circle drawn with ink and in that moment I felt that the world was moving me in a cruel way with the only objective of remind me that I had not seen everything. And that was right. I observed closely all the tracing of the scalpel. Blood was emanating from the skin mixed with adrenaline.

He finished cutting almost all areola and right then it happened the worst. He lifted it from one side with his white bloody gloves. The nipple was hanging from the small strip of the tissue that he did not cut and this invite us to see the breast’s insides of Marilyn, because according to him he has discovered something wrong. He showed us that the left prosthesis had been set behind the pectoral muscle while the right one was in front of the muscle. But the anomalies did not finish there. The worst of all was that the first prosthesis of silicone was put in the wrong way, the flat part outwards and the convex one inwards (the prosthesis had the shape of a “domo” it means the base was flat and half circumference up). This was what Blanchar got us see, foretelling that maybe things were not going to be right.

After the cuts on the areolas, there was the silicone bags extraction. This action was very rude, pulling the bags as a dentist pulls the third molar. There is no other way. It is so shocking the scene that you could imagine that women could die if anesthesia did not exit. Before they threw them away, I asked for the bags and the doctor himself cleaned and gave them to me. I still have them and thousands of school girls from all over the country have had them on their hands. These have been good to get them think about the convenience of having in their bodies strange and heavy agents that can cost the same of two or three semesters in the university.

When the prosthesis were out, Blanchar did the other two cuts (the ones located four centimeters from the areolas) with the purpose of taking out the extra skin and decided to, according to what he has spoken with Marilyn, put the small prosthesis.

A new sunrise

After the surgery, Marilyn was taken to her house where her mother was waiting for her. She told me she was very happy and agreed with her daughter’s decision. Nobody suspected that something was wrong. The pains that the patient was feeling started to increase day by day and the medicine was not working as analgesic. “I was feeling as if I were ripping myself inside” she told me. The truth was that Blanchar had cut more skin than it was supposed to be cut and the suture was too tight and it was about to get broken or “unstitched” as Marilyn’s mother said.

The first two weeks of November of 2006 were passing. Cartagena was electing the new sovereign of the beauty contest and Marilyn was nostalgic for not been in that city getting more popularity. In fact it was the first thing she mentioned when she woke up. But the happiness of being operated was her consolation.

From the dream to the nightmare

The next day, when all anesthesia effects had passed, Marilyn was very sore more than the two previous operations. “I felt like crying because your spirit tells you when something is wrong”, she told me. But, Blanchar got her feel calm and assured her that everything was right.

Three weeks passed and he did not let her to be exposed to Pizarro’s flash. She says to me that he always made her be with bandage and prohibited her to see her breast. The long time after the operation started to make her worry. In fact the magazine was forced to postpone the photos for January.

But Marilyn wanted to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve breaking in her new physical condition and on December 22nd went to look for the surgeon who had taken out the stitches. She tells me that he just put an adhesive tape around the scar she had not seen it since the operation. A little dismayed and frustrated, the actress who by that time was already filming the soap opera “El Zorro”, went to her house to face her frustration. She did not understand why her healing was not complete after five weeks when it was suppose to be in the third week.

One day after Christmas she went to the shower and noticed that the water was red. She could notice fast the origin of it, this was the bleeding from her left breast. Shocked by the idea of dying, she started to cry and decided to look at the scar left by the surgeon on her third surgery. But the worst happened. When she tried to take off the tape that works as adhesive bandage, she noticed that it had her skin and the scar that Blandar never let her see looked like a rag ball just about to fell apart. With the dropping water of her naked body, she run to the phone and called Blanchar. She does not remember what she yelled at him, but it was like he had screwed up her life. That was a strong discussion during which the surgeon defended himself from Marilyn’s hysteria with cynical and suspicious arguments.

This Christmas and New Year’s Eve were the worst in the life of the actress. With bandages, crying without stopping, and getting the solidarity from her mother and family. In the middle of the drama and also scared that this case was known by public, Blanchar asked her to visit him, but she refused. She did not want to see him again and preferred to look for professional help in another place but not with another surgeon. She had to do it with a psychologist. After convincing her of the multiple possibilities of getting her skin of her breast back, the psychologist got her visit a reconstruction specialist of the “Sociedad Colombiana de Cirugia Plastica”.

The unanimous recommendation of many members of this society (where we could get the information that Blanchar does not belong to) were the doctor Luisa Plata and her husband Alejandro Duque. Marilyn found in them the hope she was asking for to get her self-esteem back.

In order to have no doubts of the things she was seeing, Dr. Plata did a photographic registration of the process. “She got there very pessimist and affected. She was nervous and convinced of not getting her left breast to its natural state. But she wanted to know first what had happened, and we explained to her in this way: Dr. Blanchar did not make the right decision, did not make a surgical plan and did not use the best technique. He removed more skin than the one he was supposed to. It is obvious that the scar does not want to heal because it is subject to high pressure. Besides, he did not put together muscle from the center and the sinmastia increased” this was the diagnosis of Dr. Plata.

But Marilyn knew that she could not stay crying over what had happened, and with the spirit that her psychologist got her feel, she made us know that she would get her fourth breast surgery. And there are some people who think that I exaggerated the plot of “Sin tetas …

And that was it. Doctor Plata and her husband prepared the patient, and set the date of the surgery. That day she arrived as if she were a new patient, convinced of what we were doing and full of faith about her recovery. “The participation of the psychologist was definitive”, assured the actress and Dr. Plata said it was necessary to get her feel trust because her self-esteem was too low. After the psychological part, it was the time of the reconstruction work. The small prosthesis were taken out from Marilyn and the scars were healed, the major pectoral muscle was operated to correct the sinmastia, the shape of the areolas was gotten back and the “ ave fenix” appeared in public on Sunday, April 1st , date when the photos of Marilyn without silicones were taken. You can see her face, it shows the happiness of rebirth. The job of the doctors Duque and Plata was so sensational that just few people could guess that Marilyn’s breast had been operated before.

The last battle is going to start and consist of knowing if she will be accepted by casting bosses, writers, cine and TV directors in Colombia and why not from around the world. By now she says that she is happy about having abandoned the mould that turned her into a clone. She is filming “El Zorro”, but there is something that encourage her to change her way of thinking: the film maker Gustavo Nieto Roa just elected her, among 30 actresses, to lead his new movie. “This is the prize that God gives for daring to be myself” she says. “I need a pretty woman who can act well, but with not too big breast”, Gustavo says and Marilyn corroborated it: “I was stigmatized and my appearance did not let me to be more than a hot girl, now I go casting to be the main character, because protagonists used to be girls with cute faces and natural bodys, something that I have now and I show it with proud”.

The drama has finished and a new professional and sentimental life is in the horizon of the woman who dares to challenge the logical laws of shows.

The truth is that all this drama, that kept her in the air and for long days of deep depression and the subsequent revive of Marilyn, could lead to a new tendency. A fact that should turn into the new paradigm of honest women from this country: the one that is “Sin tetas no hay paraiso”.

< Prev		Next >