Mother dies after being sent to surgical recovery center after Brazilian butt lift

A 32-year-old mother of two children who received cosmetic surgery has died after being sent to a Florida recovery home in August.

Rachelle Demosthenes and Jeanine Ellis traveled from New Jersey to Miami to receive procedures, including Lip 360 and a Brazilian butt lift. WPLG-TV, a Miami-based TV news station, first reported Monday.

The clinic where the two friends underwent surgery recommended that they stay in a nursing home that would have medical staff, including a nurse, for the first 24 hours after surgery.

Demosthenes arrived at the recovery home on Southwest 31st Avenue near 2nd Street earlier that morning after receiving his surgery and calling his friend, the WPLG reported.

“She just started screaming and she just told me she was in so much pain,” Ellis recalled. “She said ‘I’m in pain. But they just gave me two pills’.”

Ellis told the WPLG that when they picked her up after the surgery, “they put you in the back of a van and they just put something similar, tarpaulin or something down, and you just left for this wake-up call.”

When Ellis arrived at the house, she and Demosthenes decided to rest.

When Ellis woke up hours later, however, Demosthenes screamed surrounded by people as she allegedly walked in and out of consciousness and bled.

“So while I’m looking at my friend, I’m just seeing all this blood,” Ellis said.

Ellis said she told the woman who ran the home to call 911. She was assured that a nurse from the clinic would arrive to administer an IV infusion.

“I said, ‘No more. No nurse needs to come. 911 must come. You must call now,'” Ellis recalled. “‘Do you just want to let someone sit there and die?’ I could feel she would not call 911. “

Another woman in the home called paramedics, who took Demosthenes to the hospital. She died less than 24 hours after surgery.

Miami Fire Rescue wrote in its report that Demosthenes suffered from seizures and perhaps accidentally received an overdose of pain medication.

Ellis remembered her friend as a “beautiful person.”

“Rachelle was 32. She had two small children, and that’s the last thing she said to me,” Ellis said. “She said, ‘Tell my boys I love them.'”

When reached by Newsweek On Tuesday morning, a spokesman for the Miami Police Department confirmed that the case is still under investigation.

Brazilian butt lift surgeries – which have increased in popularity in recent years – have been investigated along with unlicensed surgical recovery homes. In 2018, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimated that nearly 1 in every 3,000 people who have the surgery dies, making it a “death rate far greater than any other cosmetic surgery.”

The procedure has a long, intense recovery process. Patients should not lie on their backs or sit on their buttocks for at least three weeks after surgery.

There have been several other cases of people allegedly dying after such a procedure, among them Instagram influencer Joselyn Cano in 2020.