Danniella Westbrook admits her face is rotting away after 'botched surgery'

Danniella Westbrook has spoken about the devastating impact a ‘botched surgery’ has had on her physically and mentally.

The former EastEnders actress opened up to the Mirror about her facial disfigurements that have plagued her in recent years. As a result of drug use (specifically cocaine) over a number of years, Westbrook, 44, is still recovering from her septum falling out in 2000.

Since then, she’s claimed a surgery-gone-wrong on a TV show in 2015 left her with osteoporosis, whereby the condition is slowly making her bones in her face weaken. As a result, she’s seen her left shoulder ‘disintegrate’, the loss of her left cheek and upper gum that sees denture simply 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 bones not strong enough,’ she said.

In order to help her condition and strengthen her bones, she’s consuming up to 12 pints of milk each day in preparation for her reconstructive surgery.

‘I’ve got to laugh or I’ll cry but it makes me so unhappy,’ Westbrook admits.

The actress says it annoys her when people assume the problems are because of her cocaine addiction: ‘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.’

During her 2016 stint in Celebrity Big Brother, Westbrook was removed from the house in order to undergo emergency surgery due to the pain in her teeth.

‘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.’

That meant seven weeks in hospital where she almost died of septicaemia. ‘The blood got into where the bone was, if it weren’t for the Royal London I’d probably be dead,’ she revealed.

‘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.’

Now, the former EastEnders star has severe anxiety over her looks and shared in what ways it’s hindered her life: ‘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,’ she said. ‘It makes me nervous and I’m scratching; I get really bad anxiety,” she admits.

‘Some days I wake up and I’m so swollen and other days it can look really sunken,’ she said about her face and described the pain as ‘unbelievable’.

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