Confessions of a wheelchair-user woman about cosmetic/plastic surgery:

I just want to express how I actually feel about myself, the concept of beauty, accepting yourself etc…

First of all, we started to hear and see a lot of things about body positivity over instagram, blogs, magazines… I like the concept and I agree, it is not ideal to try to force yourself to look like a model and be very skinny bla bla bla…

However, I just disagree to the fact that when you use the word body positivity, you suddenly become happy and accept yourself and ‘blame’ the outer factors… I honestly think whoever says they are %100 happy the way they look, I think they are just lying. I think there is always going to be a part of your body, a look etc… something that you will not like about yourself. Accepting self is not an easy thing to do and body positivity is certainly not about oh I cannot loose weight, it is just not in my genes so now I don’t care
and it’s not me, it’s them kind of attitude…

I feel like body positivity has risen against very pretty looking blonde skinny instagram girls who takes 1000 selfies a day and I get it and I agree that we should try to fight against this fake pose looks, if I would give you an example, it would definetly be about
girls in underwear posing on bed and the post has this caption #quarantinemood. I mean, REALLY? Is that really your quarantine mood? Like you have not spend 2 hours doing make up&hair, picking the outfit etc…

On the other side of this, we have this body positivity concept, people posting their natural selves with their flaws and imperfections…

Now, the one thing I want to discuss about this is that as much as I think the blonde skinny insta girls are fake, I think most body positivity motivational concepted posts are fake too… Because it mostly feels like these people force themselves to like themselves the way they look, but NO! HEY, GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK!

All I am saying is that, we should find a balance between all this.
I want to go into a bit more depth about accepting yourself issue, let me give you some background info about myself: I am the international patient coordinator of ClinicArts and I am paraplegic which means I had an accident and broke my spine which jeopardized my spinal cord and left me paralyzed from waist down and now I am a full time wheelchair user.

It has been a roller coaster journey for me to try to accept myself, and I am still evolving. I used to not go to the clinic and meet our international patients who came all the way from UK, Australia or even Canada to have their plastic surgeries done, like rhinoplasty,
liposuction, breast augmentation etc. I used to have my phone with me all the time and contacted them via whatsapp, phone etc. and when they actually come to the clinic to meet with our doctors, their first words were: where is Ferve? And our nurse speaks good
English so she took care of our patients. This really made me sad, there are a couple of reasons behind it, first the clinic was not wheelchair friendly but not thanks to Dr. Kerem, he made the place more friendlier for me. And the second reason is that I was not ready to face the shock on our patient’s faces when they get to see me. So, I was this invisible ghost who spoke and took care of our patients needs. ????

When this issue started to bother me a lot, I first took a step about changing my whatsapp profile picture to a wheelchair photo of me and I started to speak more openly to our patients about my situation.

I slowly adapted to this, first I needed to make changes in my own personal life, I needed to take one small step about loving myself no matter what. I started going out more, I went on some dates…

All these normal activities showed me that I can actually be normal while sitting on a wheelchair and started to see that people’s reactions formed according to my attitude. Meaning, whenever I felt like shy or like a loser, the person in front of me thought about
me that way. So, finally when I started to embrace myself, I saw that people around me were accepting me normally.

So, I took a deep breath and entered the clinic door to welcome my first patient face to face. She was there, waving at me and then came to hug me and thanked me about how helpful I was until she got here and she would not have done it without me. This just
made me the happiest person on earth, because I get to touch people’s lives, not just our doctors are allowed to do that! (Sorry I had to brag about them because I am so proud of our surgeons. ???? )

And then, the routine process continued, she had surgery and went back home happily and we are still in touch to this very day.
Now, when I look back, I can see how far I came along with accepting and loving myself, but this does not change the fact that I am so happy that I had done lip fillers, or buccal fat removal procedure. ????

Having these minor changes in your body does not make you %100 fake! If this will make you happy, go for it!

For example getting fillers really helped boosting my confidence and now I am a lot relaxed while taking photos. If fillers are going to help accepting myself more, why should not I try it? What’s the harm it as long as you do not go very far?

Right now, I am unhappy with the way my breasts look, and it lowers my self-esteem, I am planning to have Dr. Burak and Dr. Metin perform breast reduction surgery for me! SHHH don’t say anything, they don’t know about it YET! ????