It is now confirmed that forty-three-year-old British-Nigerian businessman and social media influencer, Igho Ubiribo (alias Ego), who died on March 6 in Thailand, died from his attempt to enlarge his manhood. He died after receiving 40 millilitres of hyaluronic acid and lidocaine at a clinic in Bangkok.
Ubiribo was on holiday in Thailand with his wife, Danielle Simba Allen, when he decided to go for the enlargement procedure.
After the procedure, he was said to have complained of chest pain during a massage session with his wife. He reportedly lost consciousness twice, following which he was rushed to a hospital where doctors recommended CT scan when they discovered a blood clot blocking a blood vessel in his lungs (pulmonary embolism).
But he lost consciousness before the scan could be done and never regained it despite the doctors’ attempts to resuscitate him for over one and a half hours.
An initial or primary autopsy conducted in Bangkok immediately after Ubiribo’s death identified a fatal pulmonary embolism as the cause of his death. According to ‘Daily Mail’, this was corroborated by the postmortem conducted in the UK which ‘found that cellular material in Ubiribo’s lungs matched the hyaluronic acid used in the penile filler injection’.
Indeed, coroner Jean Harkin concluded that Ubiribo died ‘as the result of a cosmetic procedure abroad’.
Although Ubiribo had since been buried in London in May at a high profile funeral attended by Davido and other dignitaries, he was only the latest of such people who were not satisfied with what nature endowed them with.
It is unfortunate that some men would still want to take the risk to undergo penile filler procedures despite medical experts’ concern that it could have devastating consequences for patients.
Recall the March 2, 2019 case of Ehud Arye Laniado. He too died of a fatal heart attack that was triggered by cardiac hypertrophy (an enlarged heart) during a cosmetic penile enlargement procedure.
Recall also the the tragic 2019 ‘German silicone case’ in which a 46-year-old fake medic injected silicone oil into his 32-year-old victim’s genitals, after which the ‘patient’ died of sepsis. Sepsis, according to AI Overview, is ‘a life-threatening medical emergency that happens when the body has an extreme, harmful response to an infection’.
But the problem of dissatisfaction with nature’s creation is not limited to men and penile enlargement.
It is even more pervasive among the women who attempt to recreate virtually all parts of their bodies: from their tummies (tummy tuck), breast enlargement, etc.
A good example was that of Stella Obasanjo, the wife of Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo who died in Marbella, Spain, on October 23, 2005, from complications that attended a botched cosmetic surgery (tummy tuck and liposuction).
A common denominator is that these attempts at altering the state of nature would appear an affliction of the wealthy and influential. And necessarily so because these procedures don’t come cheap.
What is more? They are not covered by health insurance because they are performed for their cosmetic value. So, anyone interested in them must be ready to cough up the money for the procedures personally.
We can only hope that humanity would stop losing people that could have helped to lift others with their wealth and influence, through these social vanities or inanities.
These sudden and untimely deaths are enough to teach people to be content with the way nature created them.
Peer influence can only apply to the living. In the same way, people should learn to be themselves and not pander to undue pressure over their physical size or the size of their manhood.
But if the rich kill themselves through these expensive procedures, we also have a word for the not-too-rich who consume all manner of local herbs or drinks to enhance sexual performance: they too may be killing themselves slowly by some of the things they consume.