Читать книгу Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird - Mark Dolan - Страница 7

Well, if Minka is a living legend, and a symbol of a bygone era in terms of enhanced women, Brazilian model and media personality Sheyla Hershey is distinctly about the twenty-first century. Just twenty-three, she boasts a reality show in the US and can even more proudly boast she hasn’t so much as taken her top off. Not that the images I see online leave much to the imagination. Pouting glumly at the camera, she looks like a bleach-blonde equivalent of Posh Spice, but one whose figure suggests she’s enjoyed rather a few more steak dinners than Posh has. She is perhaps aping the Marilyn Monroe shape, but with two distinct additions that would have Norma Jean turning in her Hollywood grave. Sheyla lives in Houston, Texas from where she earns an apparently decent living modelling and making numerous TV appearances, including her own reality strand on CBS television. There are lots of references to her online as the Brazilian Jordan – God what a thought.

So why am I swelling my carbon footprint further, to meet this woman? She is, at this moment, flying to Brazil to have another breast augmentation. This, if it goes the way she wants it to go, will increase her breast size to 55 cubic centilitres per breast, which would be a world record. It’s too good an opportunity, in exploring this world of enhanced women and what motivates them, to meet a woman who is in the process of getting bigger, or indeed about to be the biggest. Who knows, I might even be able to talk her out of it…

Sheyla’s flying back to Brazil, to a beach town called Villa Bella on the north-east coast of Brazil, where her sister lives. I fly from Vegas to Houston and we then meet up and fly together to Brazil. I was quite anxious about whether she would actually catch the flight, as up until now, on the phone and on email, she’s been mercurial to say the least. But something told me, particularly after looking at her website (which is a masterclass in self-promotion), that this was another media appearance she wasn’t going to miss.

I wander around Houston Airport, dazed by a heady mix of jetlag and weak American lager. And there she is, standing outside a Hudson News, looking lost. And glamorous. She’s wearing what looks like a woollen bra, in tartan, and a matching miniskirt approximately one centimetre in length. All the clothes look incredibly tiny. In keeping with the Mrs Beckham theme, it looks like she has stolen one of Posh’s outfits and forgotten she is a size 12, not a size 6. Her skin is caked in a glutinous light-brown make-up/fake tan. She looks like her entire body has been dipped in a vat of the caramel bit of a Cadbury’s Caramel. Her hair is blonde and brittle; I’d suggest it’s been so long since it was the colour God intended that now even God can’t remember what colour it was supposed to be. She’s wearing heels that approximate in height to all the Harry Potter books piled on top of each other, and her ability to stand for more than five seconds in them involves a similarly impressive amount of wizardry. And her breasts…

Ah yes. Her breasts. Why we’re here. Well, they are very large. But they are not on the Minka scale. Instead she looks like a sexually frustrated cartoonist’s impression of a woman. Like a supersized Jessica Rabbit crossed with a Russ Meyer actress, and a bit of Babs Windsor thrown in for good measure. And there is something comical looking about this lady and it’s not just her top-heavy profile. She looks more like a character than a real person. She is a sort of walking human caricature. And I’m about to get on an airplane with her. Fortunately we are allocated seats at separate ends of the plane, allowing me to keep my powder dry in terms of questions and avoiding a syndrome the great Les Dawson used to refer to as ‘having the fight before you get in the ring’. I sip my Caffeine Free Diet Coke, thus experiencing no physical emotion whatsoever and wait for the hours to pass, only to be occasionally stirred by the sight of the inflated, tartan-clad blonde making her way to the loo. In the context of this flight, she is a vision, an airbrushed, bouncing bombshell, clashing wildly with the grey plastic backdrop of this American Airlines 737 and its jaded passengers.

We arrive in Brazil, and she seems to perk up once she strides into the airport. Every footstep of her faux Jimmy Choos can be heard for miles. The shrill clatter of her heels announces that Sheyla’s coming home. She is speaking at double speed, perspiring slightly, and is fidgety. It feels like she is morphing into her public persona and is somehow preparing to put on a show. As we walk through the sliding doors into the public part of the airport, there is the sound of shrieking and general excitement. They are calling out her name. Flashguns on cameras are splashing light onto both of us, and I’m feeling like a spare part, knowing they’re not here for me, but I’m there anyway – a feeling Denis Thatcher undoubtedly had for about three decades. There are perhaps thirty people gathered, with all permutations of camera equipment with which to capture the moment. Bizarrely, in the mêlée, a woman rushes up to me and gives me a hug! Now this is my first time in Brazil, so perhaps this is what happens. Or maybe she has never seen someone quite so tall, thin and pale in her country before, and feels the need to touch me to see if I’m real. With a little help from Sheyla as interpreter, it transpires that Balls of Steel – a late-night TV comedy show I presented for Channel 4, is shown in Brazil. This is a surreal interruption to an otherwise surreal arrival. Luckily Balls of Steel appears not to be a ratings monster here, as, apart from some odd looks and whispering in an elevator later that day, that’s the last time my global fame is to interrupt this journey.

There are placards with Sheyla’s name scrawled across them, being held aloft. Quite poorly scrawled. It always amazes me that people who make placards, in all walks of life, couldn’t have a better sense of production value. Be it striking workers, protesting students or celebrating football fans, I’m always wondering whatever happened to good quality marker pens, and fabric suited to the painting materials being deployed. And couldn’t someone decide in advance what the size and style of the font will be? And surely only the person in the group with the greatest artistic skill and command of the English language should be allowed anywhere near the paint itself. I don’t think this is unreasonable.

And speaking of paint, these placards for Sheyla lack the whiff of authenticity. And as there are lingering, emotional hugs all round with her ‘fans’, it starts to look more like a reunion of family and friends, than the arrival home of a Jordan-like icon. Even the most rabidly ambitious starlet doesn’t kiss fans on eight different parts of their face. Interrupting the adulation for a second, I ask, ‘So Sheyla, how do they know that you are here?’

‘Ah well, like, obviously, I talk with the local news about what’s going to—’

‘You give them a little tip off?’

‘Yeah’, she says.

Oh, well that answers that. I’m used, in these journeys, to dealing with people who are as evasive as they are unique. Not Sheyla. It seems it’s not just her tights that are transparent. We leave the media scrum (5 per cent local media, 95 per cent uncles and aunties), we jump into a waiting taxi and head to her sister’s place, where I’ve been promised a Brazilian barbeque, which sounds like a violent variation on the Brazilian wax, but which I’m hoping is a meal. Villa Bella is a seaside town not in the mould of what you’d expect from the Brazilian coastline. Not a particularly eye-catching beach, no soft drinks concessions, no sun umbrellas, no six-pack-clad dudes working out on the sand and no local girls showing off their legendary South American derrieres. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of beachfront entertainment either – it seems to be one of those seaside towns which is more town than seaside. It’s Hove to Brighton’s Copacabana.

We drive through a nexus of fairly rundown streets, featuring motor parts shops and local eateries that would take some personal courage to enter; the drooling Rottweiler at the entrance being the most welcoming member of staff. The town is ramshackle, scruffy and a bit untidy, but it has a certain ugly duckling charm. And with young kids happily playing football on the street – no doubt preparing to thrash England at the 2030 World Cup – and with mums hanging their washing on lines while exchanging the latest gossip, this place does feel like a community and there’s a warmth in not only the temperature. We reach her sister’s house. It is a tired-looking, small, white building, accessed via a narrow iron door and up a flight of stairs. The myriad gates, spikes and bars on the windows in this town betray the darker side of Brazilian life.

Sheyla rings the doorbell. Her sister answers and greets her with a hug. She and Sheyla are very alike, but she looks altogether more real and sensible. Siblings are often a useful way of gauging just how much plastic surgery someone has had, as they are by definition a control in the experiment – a walking ‘before’ photograph. Her sister’s softly weathered face suggests that all her time is taken up with a job, being a mother and being a wife. A glance at Sheyla’s face doesn’t tell you anything, because like the rest of her, it isn’t hers. These are two siblings that have demonstrably taken different paths in life.

I’m invited to sit and enjoy a coffee from a flask. I’m told the coffee is a fine-ground variety of Brazil’s finest, boiled and left to settle, after which sugar is added. Flying across the Americas and changing various time zones has left my head feeling like it left my body weeks ago, so the coffee is a welcome elixir. I needn’t have bothered – Sheyla is a walking stimulant. We’ve been in the house for five minutes and she strides back into the living room, wearing a different, dazzling outfit. I am to learn that she changes outfits more often than Beyonce at an awards ceremony. She is clutching a variety of medicinal-looking empty plastic sacks and tubes. These are her implants. The secrets of her success, the tools of her trade. And they look nearly as awful inside someone as out. She has saline implants – essentially salt-water-filled plastic bags. There is a little valve in each implant which a tube is inserted into, through which the solution can be squeezed, allowing you to inflate to a degree you are comfortable with. Sheyla is comfortable with an uncomfortable amount. Currently her breasts contain 4000 centilitres of fluid per breast. But this isn’t enough, apparently.

‘So if you have these implants filled up to the brim, how big will that make you per breast?’ I ask.

Sheyla, matter of fact, says, ‘I will be 5,500 per breast.’

‘Will that make you the holder of the title, the number one biggest implants in the world?’

‘Yeah, if I fill 5,500 each one that will make me the large implants in the world.’

‘Really? Number one?’

‘Number one of the whole entire world,’ she says, like a wide-eyed contestant in a beauty pageant. Her English is pretty good, but not perfect and has some idiosyncrasies, including making her sound quite childlike.

‘And how would that make you feel to be number one?’

‘Yeah I always wanna be remembered so every time the people remember about breast implants, they got to remember of me.’

‘Is that important to you, that you go down in history, that you will have a legacy?’

‘Yeah. I did this for my ego, to be happy, to be remember, so that in only a little bit more time, I will be ready to stop. But I wanna keep my size for at least a year or two, because I want to have fun with that, I wanna have a lot of fun with my breasts,’ she declares bouncily.

I’m not sure what it means exactly. But it’s illustrative of the fact that Sheyla comes across as implicitly comical, and speaks, I think unintentionally, in comical sound-bites. At regular intervals, she refers to her adoration of Dolly Parton, which seems appropriate, as there is obviously something quite bouncy, comical and not entirely real about our Dolly either. But because of her heavy Brazilian accent she tends to chop the ends off quite a few words, and regularly announces, often with a tear in her eye, ‘I just love Dolly Part. I want to be Dolly Part. Dolly Part is so beautiful and I want to be her.’

‘So you are going to be a world record breaker for a year or two, make a bit of money?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’

This is an unconvincing response. She is clearly not lacking business nous but something tells me fame is the bigger prize. Though somewhat manufactured, her airport arrival felt like the kind of thing she lives for. Already I have the sense that while Minka’s large breasts were solely about making money and indulging her husband sexually, Sheyla’s breasts seem to be about her, and the persona she’s constructed. We move upstairs for the long-promised barbeque. We eat on the top floor which has a roof and a floor, but no outer walls. Quite a feat of engineering, though not intentional I think. It looks like a part of the house which hubby hasn’t had enough bank holidays to complete, much to his wife’s chagrin. Every man has a bit of his home he hasn’t finished. It’s worn by all of us as a badge of pride. This man’s unfinished bit is an entire storey of the building – more power to his elbow.

The open nature of this top floor provides a vantage point over the whole city, which is bigger from on high that it looks in the back of a Fiat Punto taxi. The barbeque delivers. It’s decidedly un-British – not a burnt Taste The Difference sausage in sight. Just soft, sumptuous meat that would have the most ardent vegetarians reconsidering their position. A variety of just bloody enough lamb and beef, alongside some freshly broiled ham expertly grilled by a family friend. He has the air of someone who is inexplicably always there, even though there isn’t really a reason for him to be there, rather like a badly written sitcom character. There were a flurry of Seventies sitcoms that seemed to feature a policeman sitting at the table, drinking tea. For no apparent reason. But this particular gentleman at Sheyla’s sister’s place is a bone fide alpha male and he strikes me as someone it would be nice to have around, in any house, at any time. A man who understands how to cook dead animal, who knows how to hang a hook that will stay up and how to recalibrate the engine on a Mark 4 Volkswagon Golf. A proper, actual, man man. Now you’re talking.

As we delve into this protein fest, Sheyla noticeably strains with her back.

‘Do you ever get a bad back?’ I ask.

‘Yeah my back pain. The pain is a lot. Before never hurt, but now they hurt. So when I go to a restaurant like now I just rest my boobs on the table.’

I pull a face of surprise. ‘Really?’

At which point there plays out one of those moments that I will take to my grave. Like shaking hands with the smallest man on Earth, or hugging someone called Dennis who has turned himself into a cat, it’s pretty amazing. I am watching a woman rest her breasts on the table in order to rest her back. It’s an utterly bizarre act of comedy, and practicality. And it raises the key themes so far in my encounter with Sheyla – hilarity, and a sense of – what the hell are you doing to yourself? There was a hardiness about Minka, a resolve that made her look like a pro when it came to carrying her accessories around. It’s just business. With Sheyla, the whole enterprise feels more impulsive and emotional and I’m not sure that she, or her back, will take the strain for long.

After eating almost an entire farmyard’s worth of barbequed animal, it is time to hit the mall, and time for part two of the Sheyla show. She insists on bringing her make-up artist and close friend, a detail which indicates what this visit will entail, and she doesn’t disappoint. At the entrance to the mall a small crowd gather, taking pics and staring. After many minutes, we enter the shopping centre itself and Sheyla tends to her fame the way you are supposed to tend to a log fire – enjoy the heat when it’s roaring, and stoke it up a bit when it goes down. In those brief moments when nobody is taking an interest, Sheyla shrieks, giggles and if all that fails, wiggles her breasts.

Let’s be clear about this – there’s no irony being deployed. No Babs Windsor tongue firmly in cheek, with a wink to the knowing audience. Sheyla is just simply wiggling her breasts so people will look at her. End of, as an indigenous Londoner would say. Look at me, I’m wiggling my breasts. Look! Wiggle wiggle wiggle! It goes without saying, it’s unedifying, but I guess this is what you do if you have no discernible skill and if fame is the game. Sheyla has made herself unique in a way nature failed to do. Paul McCartney was born with the power of melody, Picasso the power of the paintbrush and Shakespeare was good at plays. With no such obvious gifts, or the education or opportunities to realise any talents lying dormant in her, what’s a girl who wants to be a star to do?

Amid the mostly positive public reaction to Sheyla’s arrival, there is a black sheep in the adoring family. A middle-aged woman utters some remark about her being ugly. This woman is in a group of one saying it, but isn’t there a silent majority, even the people snapping Sheyla on their mobiles, who also think that what she has become is ugly? Because let’s be honest – it is – isn’t it? The passing party-pooper is surely just the less deceived in this whole affair, and the more honest of her fellow shoppers. Sheyla’s reaction to the heckle is characteristically ebullient.

‘What do you think about that?’ I say. ‘She called you ugly. That’s not very nice is it?’

‘She is old, she is old, she is unfashionable.’ I’m chuckling at Sheyla’s brass. It’s a great line. Even if it doesn’t actually answer the question. I push the issue.

‘It’s got to hurt a little bit, hasn’t it?’

She pushes her head back haughtily. ‘Just make me laugh,’ she says. Reaching for another, more on-message passer-by, she says, ‘Look, she say I am beautiful.’

‘Oh well, that’s better isn’t it,’ I say. ‘You love this, don’t you, you know, you are running after people and helping them with the camera and showing yourself off.’

‘Yes, you know, because I like the attention, it’s good for me.’

Is attention really good for anyone? I personally think you’re damned if you don’t get it, but double damned if you do. This is a problem Sheyla seems to desperately want. She suddenly grabs my arm and frogmarches me to our next photo opportunity, at a swimwear shop. I’m beginning to eel somewhat compromised at this point. My interviewee is driving this whole thing. Should I be a bit worried, um, you know, journalistically? I have travelled many thousands of miles, I have a limited amount of time with my subject, and I need to understand why she has made these choices in her life. But this seems unlikely to happen because when I turn my back for three seconds, I discover she has squeezed into a bikini designed for a five-year-old and is dancing around inside the shop, declaring, ‘I like my boobies. And I love Dolly Part.’

Any sense of control I might have goes out the window at this point. It is the Sheyla show, and I only have a walk-on part. I tell myself I’ll have to go with this, as the public Sheyla is an unstoppable hurricane of publicity and excitement. I will wait for the doors to close and the smile to drop before probing any more deeply. Until then I’ll have to just enjoy one of my top ten most insane visits to a shopping mall. And incongruously spot a pair of flipflops that would suit my wife.

On the way out, I put it to Sheyla that the interest from the public is surely in her breasts and not actually her. Isn’t that a bit odd? I ask her.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘They love my personality. My personality is beautiful.’

‘But if your personality is so beautiful why do you need these?’ I point pointedly to her pointy breasts.

‘These is just a complement, just a complement,’ she explains. ‘These are my diamonds, my accessories.’

At this point, Sheyla is distracted, like Tiger Woods at a waitress convention. She starts conversing with another insta-group of ‘fans’ and then comes to me with a summing up of their brief but intense discussion.

‘They say I have to go bigger!’

‘Oh really?’ I reply. ‘This is how you make big decisions is it?’

The irony of this statement is missed on Sheyla and she carries on into the distance, tottering, jiggling and wiggling. This isn’t someone who does self-aware.

Once the dust has settled, Sheyla and I break every health and safety rule in the book by going to have a sit down on the local beach. I want to get her away from the crowds and talk to the real Sheyla about how she became Sheyla with a capital S. The sun is beginning to set, and it coats us both in a warm yellow light. Sheyla looks even more tanned, I just look slightly jaundiced. Sheyla is tired – this suits her – at last she’s calm and somewhat manageable. Riding the crest of this wave, I actually ask her a question.

‘So how did you get to this point of all these operations and looking the way you do now?’

‘I came from a very, very poor family,’ she explains. ‘You know, after my dad died, my mum had eleven kids and she was sick, and she couldn’t take care of all of us and I wanted to kill myself. I took some rat medicine that will kill you, I drunk that.’

Eh? Have you ever heard a sentence so packed with incident? This is a lot to take in. Only characters in soap operas talk like that don’t they? (e.g. ‘I had the abortion because Terry wasn’t the father who killed Norm who’s gone to Australia because he sold the shipyard to Uncle Phil who isn’t actually anyone’s uncle’). But this is how Sheyla talks. It’s very, very troubling stuff indeed, but the way she reels it off makes it feel like another performance. This time it’s ‘sad Sheyla’. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I give her the benefit of the doubt. Unhelpfully I’m growing fond of this crazy lady.

‘Rat poison. You consumed rat poison?’ I say.

‘Yes, rat poison and I drunk all this medication and I guess it was because all this happened to me at first.’

At which point she takes out her leopard-skin encased iPhone to show me pictures of herself before any of the plastic surgery. She does look wildly different. Mousey brown hair, an innocent, slightly freckled face, shy-looking, big eyes, but no big boobs. It’s a different person. But not necessarily a worse one.

‘Do you think that is me, the same person?’ she asks.

‘I would never in a million years think that was you,’ I say.

‘Do you want me to look like this?’ she continues, warming to her theme. Why am I accountable for her actions all of a sudden? Leave me out of this – I wasn’t there at the time! Sheyla has a dangerous habit of asking near strangers to lend credence to her drastic actions and life choices.

‘Well, I think, you know, you looked pretty in a different way then,’ I suggest.

‘I wasn’t happy. You know, if I was like this right now I would just break the mirror.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, not happy,’ she says.

At this point there is a rare flash of sincerity in Sheyla’s eyes. She means it. She seems to truly dislike her former self. It doesn’t take a great deal of psychological Cluedo to work out that the girl in the photograph was in a bad place, and one way to fix the problem was to change the way she looked and thus change her life. In a sense it’s using the surgeon’s knife to force life’s hand. This I suspect is the core hope at the heart of most plastic surgery patients. As I am to discover later, plastic surgery is rarely rational – this is one of the great myths about it.

The wind is blowing Sheyla’s bleached, crunchy, yellow doll’s hair. We get to the turning-point moment in her life. When she was twenty she met an Englishman who changed everything. Who was, you guessed it, a big boob fanatic. Ah, the smoking gun…

‘He saved my life,’ she begins, ‘because after that, I never ever tried to hurt myself, only love myself.’

‘Did he originally suggest that you get implants?’

‘No, he did not say that I need to, but he say he love big breast woman. If I have implants he will be happy because he loves huge breasts.’

Right…

‘Is he a big boob fanatic?’

‘Yeah. When I met him all his computer, magazine, full of porn stars like all these huge breast woman.’

What a lovely start to a relationship. ‘Hey mum, I’ve met this guy, he’s really nice – he’s got a job, he’s nice looking. And he has a massive collection of hardcore pornography featuring women with gargantuan breasts.’

She goes on. ‘He was lot fanatic. When I met him I didn’t know, I didn’t know Minka, I didn’t know Maxi Mound and then he introduced me all these woman, he say would you like to be like that and then I was thinking to myself yeah, that’s pretty.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t do it just to make him happy because that’s how it is in a relationship, you want to make your partner happy?’

‘No. I wanna make him happy and me happy because if he was happy I was happy. But I love my breasts because I’m not with him any more and I still love my breasts so it wasn’t really about him.’

‘So you think that having these operations, having big breasts has saved your life?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Saved my life. Because look at me how happy I am.’

Now, at this point I should say I have a rule of thumb – people who say ‘Look how happy I am’ aren’t happy. The revelation here is that, as with Minka, there is a man, a big boob fanatic, who has instigated this whole process. It’s impossible to imagine that Sheyla’s life would have played out like this if she hadn’t met this Englishman (what is it about Englishmen by the way? I’m not proud). Clearly he met her at a time when she was genuinely vulnerable and he was no doubt rather caring and loving and whatever he gave her emotionally hit the spot, and perhaps even saved her life. But his affection came with a price tag. ‘I like massive breasts…’ I’m imagining the conversation went. ‘…Here’s a phone number of a great plastic surgeon I know. Oh and by the way, I love you.’ No pressure then.

What’s curious though, and why I’m prepared to not judge this man too harshly is that clearly Sheyla has embraced the change her body has forced upon her. He has long since bitten the dust, but the legacy of his fetish lives on in this woman. She has taken the big boobs and run with them, so to speak. With Sheyla, there isn’t that sense of someone who foolishly tattooed the name of a lover onto their chin, only to discover they’ve run off with someone else. Rather, this crazy and in my view appalling intervention from the hand of the surgeon, caused Sheyla to restart her life. A reboot. With the reboobs. A reboob reboot. OK, that’s enough.

And so we are where we are. This is Sheyla’s life now and she doesn’t have a sense of imprisonment in her own body that Minka does. Minka’s boobs are a necessary evil. ‘It’s money. Money, power,’ as she told me over and over again. Sheyla needs the boobs. They are a life support system. The day she had her first op was the first day that she decided for the first time to like herself. So naturally one consequence, and this is the plastic surgery trap, is that to have that feeling, you’ll inevitably go back for more. Before we depart the beach, which is now lit only by the moon, and passing police cars, she calls her plastic surgeon on the phone. It’s a jovial chat. It’s like she’s talking to her hairdresser. She has decided she wants to have her procedure an hour earlier tomorrow. I’m shocked at the informal nature of the chat she’s having with this very important man.

I bid her farewell and she goes off for some beauty sleep, prior to having some beauty inflicted on her by a surgeon’s blade. I’m surprised to learn that neither her sister or indeed any of her family will be in attendance tomorrow. I return to Sheyla’s sister’s house for another sweet coffee, to find out why. Sadly barbeque boy isn’t there. He’s probably broiling meat and installing hooks in someone else’s house. I ask her how she feels about her baby sister’s plans. I feel I already know the answer.

‘I am really worried about not only me but the whole family is worried about it,’ she says. ‘Because it becomes an obsession, a huge obsession for her and we really don’t like that to become a health problem, and nowadays going to a surgery for her is just the same as going to have her nails done, so I really don’t like it. I don’t wanna be like partner with her, when something bad comes up, so I don’t go to the surgeries with her any more.’

This is a tragic revelation. To see how someone can hurt others so much, by hurting themselves. Sheyla is far from the only victim. And her sister is across all the issues Sheyla is oblivious to, or in denial of, namely the considerable risks attached to what she is doing.

‘It really seems to upset you what she is doing to herself,’ I say. ‘How hard is it for you to see this?’

‘It is very hard actually, it makes all of us very sad indeed. We all like, we get sad but there is nothing we can do, we get sad.’

Morning has broken and I’m feeling slightly emotionally hungover from the madness of the previous day. As I push bits of hotel breakfast around my plate, I mull over the irony that today is Sheyla’s ‘special day’, when really, special is the last word I’d use. Sometimes when I’m in these situations, I feel I should make some kind of intervention. Like maybe when I’m in the operating theatre, I should rugby tackle the anaesthetist to the floor prior to the op. It’s like those cameramen and women who film a zebra being stalked by a hungry lion. Don’t they sometimes want to put the camera down and shout ‘He’s behind you!’?

But above and beyond asking her countless times what the hell she’s thinking and saying ‘Don’t do this!’, I don’t feel I can go any further. No more so than I could do with my own sister. Ultimately she is a sovereign individual and she’s mistress of her own destiny. And if her own family can’t stop her, then what hope for me? Arriving at the swanky plastic surgery clinic where she is to be pumped up, I go up to meet Sheyla in her hospital bedroom. She’s dressed in a plain white bed gown – as dressed-down as you’ll ever see this woman. I kiss her on both cheeks and ask her how she’s feeling. She clearly hasn’t had much sleep and her face is puffy. I recall my chat with her sister the night before.

‘She is obviously quite upset about you know, your operations,’ I say.

‘I don’t listen to anyone except myself and I don’t like people try to change me. People who try to change me I just keep away, them away from me.’

‘Even the people who really care about you like your family?’ I ask.

‘Even the people who care about me because is all about me, I know what I am doing and I happy to do what I am doing. That is why I wanna go bigger, because I want to be bigger, I wanted to break the world record, that makes me happy. I think my breasts is the most beautiful thing I have on my body and as long as I am awake I am going to keep them, keep growing.’

We are interrupted by a nurse coming in to give Sheyla a pill of some sort. This last exchange is typical of what I have learned about her. She is driven, an unstoppable force, her mind uncluttered with concern for the upset she is causing to those around her. This is not to be harsh about Sheyla. This is something she is sincere about having to do. It is a compulsion. This is genuinely what she wants and has to do. Whether she should be allowed to do it is another question. Her plastic surgeon is no doubt the best money can buy, but I ask myself whether she could go as big as she’s about to, in America or Britain; I’m not sure it would happen. Brazil is number two in the world for the most plastic surgeries behind the USA, but here the range of what you can have done, and to what extent, is greater.

As for today, it isn’t just her breasts that she is having fiddled with. She is also having a chin lift, liposuction and botox. Well, you know, when you drop the car into the garage for a new clutch, you normally ask the mechanic to fix that wonky wing mirror and faulty taillight while he’s at it. So what’s the difference, right…?

From the moment Sheyla and I first met, she has been imploring me to go into the operation with her. I’m actually not that squeamish about that kind of thing and have always found all aspects of medicine utterly compelling. I think being a doctor or nurse has to be the closest you’ll get jobwise to really making a difference in people’s lives. Dead or not dead. Well or not well. That is often the consequence of a medic’s day at the office. As Sheyla is wheeled into the theatre, I have the slight concern that, as she is such a force of nature, perhaps she is immune to anaesthetic, and will chat incessantly during the procedure about her boobies and her undying regard for ‘Dolly Part’. Fortunately she is not immune and one of the few upsides of this regrettable exercise, is ninety minutes of silence. As tubes pump and machines bleep, I’m struck by the stupid irony that in parts of the world there are no hospital beds for people who need them to carry on living, while elsewhere there are people having ops that are resolutely unnecessary. Maybe I’ll be eating my words when I go in for my brow lift in ten years’ time…

So instead of having new implants, Sheyla is having her existing ones filled to capacity. I was shocked at how serious an operation it was. The surgeon cuts right at the lower edge of her areola, that’s the round darker circle that circumnavigates the nipple (OK, I can’t describe breasts). He essentially slices into what looks like the most tender part of the bosom. It’s then flipped open, like the wide round lid on a plastic sports bottle. Visible immediately is the clear bag – the implant. Sheyla looks at this point like a particularly creative drugs mule. The salty water is injected into the implant via the narrow tube Sheyla was waving around in front of me the previous day. At this point the areola is flapped down again and stitched up. Ow.

I make my way out of the theatre and head to the canteen for a tea and a plain biscuit. I feel like I’ve been operated on. I wait for Sheyla to come round. I then hear that the operation was OK and that she is now a world record holder. Officially the most enhanced woman in the world. Clutching the best bunch of flowers a Brazilian petrol station has to offer, I head to her room. As I open the door, as always with Sheyla, it’s not what I’m expecting. She’s lying in the bed, bandaged, bruised, groggy. That’s understandable. But in the room with her is a photographer with a massive camera, snapping away. He asks her to sit up a bit. ‘Look this way. Look that way,’ he says. What’s going on? Before I get to asking, I greet her with a kiss. I try to be upbeat. She’s just had a significant amount surgery and is fragile in every possible way.

‘Look at this lady. How are you doing?’ I say.

‘Is that flowers for me?’ she asks sweetly.

‘Of course they are for you, who do you think they’re for?’

‘Oh my God, you did not need to!’ she replies.

‘Of course! So, who’s the photographer?’

‘This photographer, he’s for my publicity,’ she explains, slurring her words from the medication. ‘So when I need to tell my story I have those photographs.’

‘Are you really in the mood to do publicity?’ I say. ‘You’ve just had a major operation.’

Sheyla abruptly barks at the snapper, ‘Come on, take some pictures.’

‘But you’ve got, like, bandages on and everything.’ She takes no notice of me. It’s a macabre scene. She’s still got the lines that the surgeon’s made with a pen for the lipo. And she’s got bandages on her face and yet she’s doing press photographs. She’s a control freak out of control. I take this opportunity to ask her about the record now.

‘So are you the number one now, the world record holder?’ I ask.

‘As far as I know I’m the world record in breast implants.’

‘And how does that feel?’ I ask.

‘I feel great. I just, I can’t be jumpy now cos I just got them done.’

‘You can’t what?’ I ask.

‘I just want to jump,’ she says.

I wouldn’t if I were her.

She then turns to me, Bambi eyes, and says, ‘Do they look bigger to you?’

‘They do look bigger, yes,’ I say diplomatically. I can’t tell. They were always too big. And just terrible.

‘A lot bigger?’

‘Yes, they’re even bigger.’ There are men the world over having the opposite conversation about their wives’ arses. Oh the vagaries of the female psyche.

And still Sheyla seeks the validation of a near stranger.

‘Are you sure?’ she asks. ‘But you see I can add a little bit more.’

‘What, another op?’ I ask, heart sinking. I’m not hearing this.

‘Yes,’ she replies.

‘More liquid to go in there?’ I point to her chest which is now closer to my finger than it was three hours ago.

Sheyla nods.

‘I thought this was your last operation, I’m quite surprised to hear there’s going to be another one?’

‘But I always break promises,’ she says brazenly.

‘That makes me worried because I think maybe you’re going to have these operations forever…’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. She clearly does.

‘But are you going to ever…sort of, you know, say enough is enough. To say I’m big enough now and my health is a big priority?’

‘Yeah, my health is big priority but I want to be happy with myself. This is gonna be my thirty-second operation.’

‘Thirty-second?’ I ask. Am I hearing right?

‘And I’m still beautiful, I think I’m beautiful. I just…you saw my picture from before and after. Nobody believed that red, pink dress was this person, a world record is something really big for me. You got to be remembered and I want to be remembered on today.’

I’m trying to decipher how much of this is drug induced. A bit like a barroom chat with Pete Doherty.

She goes on, ‘I just want to make my family happy, I don’t hurt anybody. Why the hell I have to listen to people, if I’m not happy, why? Do you think I want to try to kill myself again?’

‘It strikes me that your breasts have kind of been part of your recovery from depression? You sort of associate your breasts with happiness? Is that right?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, I’m happy the way I am, I’m happy. I’m really happy. In a way because I want to close my past. I want to forget everything that happening to me. Everything.’

Her declaration of how happy she is arrives at the same time as her tears. Another contradiction in the muddled mind of this remarkable young woman. I’m hugely disappointed that she is announcing that she’ll have yet another operation after this, and for a moment I can feel some flavour of how it must be for her family all the time. Being told one thing, only for another thing to actually happen. Sheyla is a rollercoaster. Spending time with her is like being on that rollercoaster. It makes you queasy, shocked, hysterical and at all times you have a trickle of anxiety in the pit of your stomach. The large breasts in Sheyla’s case are, as I said, not rational, which is why I found her story even more sad that that of Minka. Yes Sheyla has some fame, and she certainly makes more money than she would if she was stacking shelves at the Brazilian equivalent of Morrisons.

And who am I and who is anyone to tell her to be ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’, ‘average’ and have the poverty that often accompanies that? She has, through sheer force of personality and two large breasts, willed a career and a livelihood for herself. I enjoyed my time with Sheyla and, like lots of things that aren’t good for you, I liked her. I wonder about her future hopes for love. Any kind of relationship with this woman, even mild friendship, would be bad for the blood pressure, but like that slice of streaky bacon, probably worth shortening your life slightly for. I hope someone nice has the years to spare. And the energy. And the patience. And he’s got to like large breasts…

Curiously, as I look back on my experience of this world, all of these women cut the figure of a tragic heroine. There’s a strange mix of courage and vulnerability displayed in their booming figures. It’s a gauntlet thrown down to the world. ‘Look at me! Be mesmerised by me. Look at how much power I harness over both all of mankind, and myself.’ Indeed to the big boob fanatics, these women are like goddesses. Semifictional deities. But I’m not a big boob fan, and I looked into the dark underbelly of these goddesses. I saw the literal and metaphorical shadow cast by these women’s breasts. And it wasn’t pretty. Sheyla’s done this to her body, because, bluntly, she’s screwed up. This was her crazy solution. In a sense it worked, because she’s still here. And she has made a career of it. But she who lives by the large breast will die by it. I’m struck by how it might be for Sheyla when her body is her last loved one to say no. To construct an entire personality around a certain set of physical attributes whacks of a deal with the devil. Or at least with the plastic surgeon.