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Dee Hicks has wanted to get breast implants for years. So many of her friends in her beach community in Florida had gotten the procedure done years ago, and Hicks, with her small chest size, felt extremely self-conscious among them.
After a long debate, the 45-year-old mother finally decided to go ahead with the procedure and have the implants put in.
Her joy, however, was extraordinarily short-lived. “Ever since I had [the implants] put in I had these rashes. I thought it was a heat rash - they were there three or four times a week,” Hicks recalled.
For the next six months, Hicks kept returning to the hospital to have tests done, in hopes of dining out what was causing her these symptoms. She spent thousands of dollars – but doctors could tell her nothing.
“The doctors were telling me I was fine and it was in my head. A lot put it down as pre-menopause,” Hicks said.
Despite Hicks’ insistence that her symptoms were something worse than hormonal changes, her doctors didn’t listen.
Half a year after Hicks had her implants put in, she’d fallen into a deep depression that was ruining her marriage and relationship with her children. She was bed-ridden and couldn’t think straight. “I felt like my lymph-nodes were going to explode. They were enlarged and swelling. My left breast was killing me. My chest was sore or tight, I was having trouble breathing,” Hicks remembered.
Desperate, and feeling like she was going to die, Hicks finally turned to Google to see if she could find answers herself.
That was when she realized: her symptoms almost perfectly lined up with those of mold poisoning.
Hicks immediately suspected her breast implants had mold in them and were causing her body to react in such a strong way.
She paid the doctors $6,500 to have the implants removed, and just 24 hours later, says she felt like “a new person” because almost all the symptoms immediately vanished.
“My quality of life has done a 360 turn. I started to recover after 24 hours and four days later I was a new person,” she said. “I'm just glad that word is getting out, I really don't know if I would be alive if I hadn't realized out it was the implants causing the problems.”
