I was left BLINDED for life and suicidal after botched fillers – and there are hundreds more like me

WHENEVER Carol Bryan looks in the mirror, she sees a stranger staring back.

The glamorous former model can no longer recognise herself after botched filler treatment caused her face to balloon and ultimately left her permanently blind in one eye.

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Carol, then 47, had dreamed of making her face look plumper and younger when she had dermal filler injected into her forehead - but instead, she was left contemplating suicide.

Within months, her features had distorted and swollen beyond recognition, baffling doctors and leaving her so devastated by her looks she became a virtual recluse.

Eleven years on, Carol remains extremely self-conscious - and is also blind in one eye, after a surgical procedure to try to correct the damage tragically resulted in vision loss.

'I'll never look the way I did'

She's now bravely speaking out to support Fabulous's 'Had Our Fill' campaign - as shocking figures reveal dozens of people in the UK alone have been blinded by dermal fillers.

"I’m extremely self-conscious every waking minute," says the devastated mum, 58.

"It's been hard to accept that I will never look as I did.

"It’s changed how I look at life. Your face is your calling card - it’s what makes you able to go out and function in the world and when you don’t have your face anymore it’s hard to know how you are."

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Fabulous's campaign calls for tighter regulations of the cosmetic treatment industry, and urges people to do their research before they submit to potentially life-changing procedures.

At present, anyone can legally inject fillers, regardless of their training and qualifications.

Women have been left with rotting tissue, agonising lumps and even needing lip amputations due to botched filler procedures. Horrifically, some have also been blinded for life.

35 Brits blinded by fillers

This little-known, yet catastrophic, consequence is backed up by chilling statistics.

About 100 people worldwide have been left blind in one or both eyes by dermal fillers, according to a 2015 report at the World Congress of Dermatology. Two thirds suffered unilateral vision loss.

In one of the few documented cases of sight being saved a 30-year-old woman in Indonesia suffered a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain after having filler injected in her nose.

In Britain alone, there are understood to be around 35 documented cases of people being blinded by dodgy filler procedures - but in reality, there are likely many more.

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'Instant' vision loss

Save Face, a government-recognised register of accredited non-surgical cosmetic practitioners, says it has helped two UK women blinded from badly-administered filler this year alone.

"When you are injecting product into the face you need to understand facial anatomy," explains the register's clinical director, Emma Davies.

"In all of the areas commonly targeted by filler there are blood vessels that travel up to serve the eye - so even if the treatment area is some distance from the eye if a practitioner injects into an artery it can block circulation to the optic nerve and that will cause instant vision loss."

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Filler lodged in eyeball

Meiska Mamajeski, from Leeds, was left permanently blind in one eye after deciding to try out a newly developed facial filler to smooth out her facial lines and wrinkles.

"Almost immediately, I saw this yellow flashing ball in my left eye," the 57-year-old recalls.

"The pain in my temple was excruciating. I yelled to the doctor to stop. I was sweating, flailing in the chair. Then the light faded from my eye and everything went black."

Meiska later learned the filler had been injected not into the skin around her eye but into the eyeball itself, where it had shattered the veins bringing blood to her retina.

The substance had then lodged at the back of her eyeball, permanently cutting off the blood supply and causing instant, irreversible blindness in her left eye.

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Earlier this week, former Wag Lizzie Cundy told how she was temporarily blinded after she got filler in her eye sockets.

Australian Mikayla Stutchbery, 24, was also nearly blinded when filler was wrongly injected into her arteries, causing her lips to burst and leading her to swallow the solution.

Terrifyingly, such blindness is irreversible if not expertly managed immediately. "There have been no examples I know of vision damage that has been successfully reversed," Emma adds.

'There's nothing wrong trying to look good'

But as ex-model Carol is all too aware, it's not just the botched filler treatments themselves that can cause blindness: surgery to repair facial damage also poses a huge risk.

Carol - who had been using Botox injections from her late 30s to smooth out fine lines on her face and maintain her youthful looks - was 47 when she tried filler for the first time in 2009.

"There’s nothing wrong with trying to look as good as you can for as long as possible - it’s a privilege our parents didn’t have, if you do it the right way in the right hands," she says.

Yet what she didn't realise was that two different types of filler - including one made from silicone - had been combined in the same syringe and injected into her forehead and cheeks.

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'It was a living nightmare'

"What I know now is that permanent filler like silicone is really not supposed to be used as facial filler, especially in areas that they are not indicated for," she tells us.

"In my case it basically caused my face to morph and devolve."

Despite panicked appointments with doctors - who couldn't work out what was wrong and mistakenly tried to dissolve the permanent filler - Carol's face continued to "grow outwards".

"It was like living in a nightmare," recalls the mum, who lives on America's west coast.

"I couldn’t bear people, especially my family, to see what had happened to me".

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Hidden away in her own home, Carol contemplated taking her own life. She allowed only her 17-year-old daughter to see her - and even then, insisted on covering her face with a hat and sunglasses.

Eventually, the desperate mum sought help from a craniofacial expert, who wept when he saw her.

But when the doctor attempted complex surgery in 2013 to try to lift her vastly over-inflated forehead up and back from her eye area, Carol found herself blind in her right eye.

'I can't imagine anyone wanting to be with me'

"My optic nerve had been irreparably damaged," she says.

"It had already been severely compromised, and I was probably going to lose the sight at some point anyway - but it was horrifying. I was in shock – both my daughter and I were scared to death."

Today, Carol, who has undergone multiple surgeries including skin grafts, a partial facial transplant and a 17-hour op, has lost any hope of having a romantic relationship.

"I can't even imagine anyone having the desire of any sort to want to be with me in that way," she says.

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Yet she's also able to count her blessings.

The mum, who has set up the American charity to campaign for the safe practice of cosmetic medicine, is determined to stop other women going through the same ordeal.

Carol warns: "Rogue practitioners and lack of awareness is putting people in very dangerous places and changing lives forever. People need to understand the risks."