A woman’s social media post about how hard it was for her to deal with her breast implants until she took them out and found that one of them was full of mold has gone viral. The woman who has since become a social media star wrote the post.
Melissa Lima, who uses the handle @melissalima713 on TikTok, said that she got breast implants in 2002 because “being in front of the camera made her feel insecure about her body.”
She went on to say that eight years later, she was in a lot of pain and didn’t know what was wrong, even though she had talked to “hundreds” of doctors about it. She continued by saying that she didn’t know if the pain was because she was pregnant or not.
“In 2010, I started becoming sick with severe joint pain, depression, and unexplained inflammation,” Melissa wrote in the overlay text of the video, as she showed pictures and clips of her swollen face. “After [hundreds] of doctors and still no answer, I just gave up.”
Then, the TikToker went on to write about how the pain affected her daily life, saying: “As a single mom, I couldn’t get out of bed to cook for my boys and would often would if they would be better off [without] me.”
She posted pictures of her swollen feet, legs, and buttocks and said that a “good friend” told her to look into breast implant illness.
After doing her research, the mother of two said, “In October 2020, I made a decision that literally changed my life.” She was talking about her choice to get rid of her breast implants. Her decision came after she got rid of the devices she used to make her breasts bigger.
Melissa then posted a video of a hand holding a breast implant that she says was filled with “mold” and was taken out during her surgery. In the video, the implant can be seen in the hand. She then published a photo that showed how one of the two saline implants had become cloudy because of mold, while the other implant didn’t seem to be affected.
The happy woman then started writing down what happened to her body as soon as she took out the implants, and she gave the following reasons: “My face and eyes literally changed within hours. I finally felt like me again!”
She ended her video by saying that she is now living her “best life” and that she is glad that her sons have “their mom back.” She said at the end of her video that she was now living her “best life.”
Melissa gave an interview with BuzzFeed about her experience after her video got 5.3 million views on the social media site. In the interview, she talked about the event.
The mother talked about some of the first symptoms she had in 2010, such as brain fog, exhaustion, and problems with her intestines. She also said that the doctors who treated her eventually found that her symptoms were caused by Hashimoto’s disease after doing multiple blood tests to look into it.
Hashimoto’s disease is “an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid gland,” according to the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic goes on to say that the immune system cells kill the hormone-making cells in the thyroid.
Melissa said that after reading up on breast implant illness, she knew she wanted to get rid of her implants, even though she wasn’t sure if that would make her pain go away. Even though she wasn’t sure, she was adamant about getting rid of the implants.
“I didn’t know if removing them was going to ‘cure’ my problems. However, I was so sick, I decided I was going to get them taken out either way,” she explained.
The TikToker also told the magazine that after her surgery, her doctor was shocked and told Melissa that he had “never seen” mold in an implant before.
Melissa says that she is “back to [her] normal self” two years after her surgery, even though she still needs to take medicine for her Hashimoto’s disease and has “joint pain” in her hips. Melissa had surgery to fix sacroiliitis, which is a problem with her hip.
“Other than that, I’m happy, healthy, and more importantly, extremely lucky to be able to get back to my normal self,” she added.
