Woman’s Breast Implant Explodes During 4-Hour Gaming Session

A Beijing woman’s breast implant exploded after she spent four hours lying on her stomach playing a game on her cell phone.

The woman was taken to the hospital, and a doctor said that the low quality of the material used in the implants, as well as the excessive and prolonged pressure, combined to cause the rupture. It is unclear whether the woman had the implant replaced.

According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, China now ranks third in the world for cosmetic surgery procedures. The United States came in first with 3.11 million people in 2011, and Brazil took second place with 1.45 million. In 2011, 1.05 million people in China had plastic surgery. While South Korea came in fourth with 650,000, its population had the highest rate of plastic surgery with 1 in 77 people going under the knife.

The unidentified Chinese woman is certainly not the first to experience an exploding breast implant due to excessive pressure. Last November, a Texas woman claimed that an officer caused her breast implant to rupture during an arrest for a unpaid speeding ticket. Rebecca Van Hooser said that the officer threw her against her car, and that the force caused the implant to rupture. She screamed in pain and the officer told her that the arrest wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. Van Hooser spent the night in jail, and her attorney said that the ruptured implant caused her client to suffer a host of health problems.

However, in at least two cases, breast implants have saved a woman’s life. In 2006, a Canadian woman named Eileen Likness was shot at twice by her ex-boyfriend, Fernando Chora. The bullets grazed her arm, entered the right implant, scratched her breastplate and then exited her left breast. The implants “were all but deflated” after taking the “brunt of the force” from the bullets, and Likness credited the implants for saving her life.

In 2009, Lydia Carranza was shot in the chest by a gunman who had opened fire at the Family Dental Care Clinic in Simi Valley. Doctors believed that Carranza’s implants saved her lief by stopping the bullet inches from her heart.