The horror that befell Oscarina Busse’s backside began in July, 2009. The 35-year-old Floridian felt a dull but persistent itch deep in the meat of her buttocks, one that was impossible to scratch.
It wasn’t long before Oscarina noticed that her butt was changing colours – first turning purple, like a throbbing finger that had been wrapped too tightly with string, and then a cadaverous grey. From there, things got much worse. Her flesh started to crust and painfully peel off until, a few months later, the whole mess collapsed like a badly baked cake. The cheeks of her ass drooped down, loaded with a stew of poisonous goop that collected around her lower buttocks. What had once stood high and felt supple to the touch had become hot and hard and stinging. Oscarina’s derrière had transformed so much that it no longer looked like it was part of a human’s body; her five-year-old daughter mistook her fluid-filled cheeks for a poopy diaper, calling it a “full Pamper”.
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Like thousands of women across the globe and increasingly in the US, Oscarina was suffering from the side effects of a black-market butt injection. Because of its clandestine nature, it’s impossible to quantify exactly how many people in the US are illegally getting their butts pumped up like a pair of Reeboks. But the number is definitely growing; due to the proliferation of reported disfiguring cases like Oscarina’s, and even deaths, law-enforcement officials and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons view black-market butt injections as a burgeoning epidemic in the US.