It took five agonising leg operations and six years of legal battles, but it’s worth it to get my bikini body: City banker is delighted to settle £1m fight against pioneering surgeon she blamed when leg-lengthening ops ‘went wrong’

A former banker who claims she ‘missed out on six years’ of her life due to a vicious legal battle with her former surgeon says she’s thrilled about her new ‘height and bikini body.’

Elaine Foo, a banker on the London trading floor of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, decided to get leg-lengthening surgery after she became fed up of being bullied for her former height of 5ft 2in.

‘The senior men thought that I was the intern. The standard comment when I came into meetings was “coffee, one sugar”. I got fed up with wearing very high heels. I was desperate to wear flat shoes’, the 49-year-old told the Times. 

The 49-year-old sought out the services of Jean Marc Guichet, a doctor who was known as ‘the father of leg lengthening’, to carry out the procedure in Milan. 

But the surgeries he carried out caused her left leg to fracture and the rod in her right leg to ‘accidentally extend’, leaving her left leg ‘dangling 16cm off the ground’, London’s High Court heard. 

She was left bleeding in a Milan hotel, terrified for her health. 

‘I had to recover by myself and I was bleeding in the bed. I couldn’t move, I had to urinate into a cup and I was terrified that I would be kicked out of the hotel’, she said. 

The allegedly botched surgeries forced Foo to turn to the NHS to correct, after she ran away from Milan following. 

‘I decided to run back to London and was taken in a wheelchair to the airport. After arriving back, I went straight to A&E’, she told the Times. 

While NHS staff were initially ‘dismissive’, she eventually saw a sympathetic consultant, who commissioned two corrective surgeries. 

After healing from her NHS surgeries, she set about suing the doctor for medical negligence. 

Despite the years-long battle, Guichet, who pioneered a type of surgery that involving the insertion of a mechanism known as ‘Guichet nails’ that are designed to be increased in length slowly and allow muscle and bone cells to fill in the gaps, thereby increasing the length of the limbs, admitted no liability when he settled the case. 

His barrister, Rob Sowersby, said: ‘Guichet’s case is that there was no negligence.’

He added that while there had been ‘unfortunate non-negligent complications’, the banker had been warned of the possibility before the surgery, and that they were aggravated by Foo’s actions.

Foo said following the case’s conclusion: ‘I’m happy with my height and my bikini body. I used to hate my stocky body on the beach. Now I’m happy.’

‘I feel good. I’m not very balanced. I fall over sometimes and I can’t run, but that’s fine’, she added.