R&B star K. Michelle (real name: Kimberly Michelle Pate) showed off her 25-pound weight loss following four plastic surgeries to remove illegal butt injections that leaked internally down her legs.
“I’m healing up,” K. Michelle wrote on Instagram. “I lost 25 pounds that my doctors are saying is mandatory to gain back for health. I’m just happy I have no more silicone in my body and I’m in physical therapy to build my muscles again.”
It has been a long road to recovery for the Love and Hip-Hop: Hollywood star, who underwent four surgeries and two blood transplants after her black-market silicone butt injections made her deathly ill.
‘Your Body Cannot Handle Foreign Objects’
“Now we know the outcome of these [injections],” K. Michelle told People . “Before it was up in the air, but now we know the outcome, that your body cannot handle foreign objects in it.”
Like many of today’s celebrities, the R&B singer was desperate to get injections to make her glutes look bigger and rounder.
The trend was kick-started by pop sensation Jennifer Lopez, whose butt is naturally big. When reality TV star Kim Kardashian shot to fame, butt implants became a huge trend.
In 2012, K. Michelle got hip and butt injections on the black market from a guy in Atlanta who wasn’t a physician.
“He wasn’t a doctor,” she recounted. “It was black market. It was these ‘hydrogel’ injections. When I found out my favorite rapper did it, that’s when I decided, ‘I’m getting it done.’ ”
K. Michelle is no stranger to plastic surgery. She previously got breast implants and had the fat from her stomach area sucked out and injected into her glutes and hips. She’s also rumored to have had a nose job.
“I wanted to look like a Coke bottle,” she said.
K. Michelle said the illegal injections stayed in place for five years, but in 2017, she started experiencing horrible back and leg pains, migraines, and chronic fatigue.
At first, doctors thought she had lupus but then discovered that the silicone injections K. Michelle had gotten five years earlier had damaged the tissue in her legs after spreading in her lower body.
K. Michelle underwent four painful corrective surgeries to remove the butt injections along with dead tissue in her legs. She said the recovery has been tough, and the near-death experience has scared her straight.
Kim tell me your secrets @KimKardashian pic.twitter.com/ve1srAiFjh
— lyndee (@lb5677) December 22, 2013
K. Michelle plans to undergo reconstructive butt plastic surgery in August. She said her near-death experience has been a valuable lesson in self-acceptance.
“I’m happy with my body,” she said. “It’s nowhere near the ideal that I had before, but when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be my body.”
Season 5 of Love and Hip-Hop: Hollywood premieres July 23.