Gabby Windey candidly opened up about her experience with “bad Botox” on her podcast, Long Winded. In the episode aired on Thursday, June 13, the 33-year-old former Bachelorette shared a story about getting neck Botox for the first time—and it’s a lesson in side effects we can all learn from.
“When I was a Broncos cheerleader, our arms were always up with the pom-poms. I noticed in all the pictures we’d get back that whenever I’d raise my arms above my head, I would get a lot of wrinkles on my neck,” Windey explained in the episode.
“On the Broncos, we had this woman who used to be a cheerleader and now is an aesthetician, and she gave us cheap Botox at $8 a unit or something,” she continued.
When the team’s go-to aesthetician determined she didn’t have the experience to administer neck Botox, Windey went to an ENT doctor, trusting him to do a good job. He admitted that he typically only performed neck Botox on “older women,” but due to the amount of research she had done and her fear of talking herself out of it, she didn’t ask him any questions.
After he injected the Botox, Windey recalled that her neck felt “pretty tender.” Three days later, she returned to cheer practice and felt like her neck could “swivel off its axis at any point in time.”
“I’ve lost all my muscle contraction in the front of my neck,” she said, adding that she managed not to draw attention despite feeling like her “head could completely fall of its neck and twist around.”
She said that she and a friend went outside cheer practice to check her pulse every 15 to 30 minutes to make sure “she was alive.”
“Somehow I thought that it was going to kill me by way of de-pumping the carotid because the muscles around the neck, I didn’t know if that elasticity of the carotid artery was related to the muscle contraction.”
What’s more, Windey lost her ability to swallow correctly and was aspirating on her food. Because she’s a nurse, she made herself “stroke swallow,” a technique she knows as a registered nurse who’s previously treated patients with dysphagia after having a stroke.
Her voice also “dropped two to 10 octaves.” When she went to her doctor for a two-week follow-up, he speculated that she had a cold, but she was convinced it was due to the neck Botox.
“My neck was compromised for two to three weeks, Windey said. Even so, she admitted that “it worked” and that the lines on her neck didn’t look as severe. She also boldly admitted that she’s returned to the doctor for more once it wore off. “Have I gone back? You bet your ass,” she said.
Windey’s experience highlights the importance of asking questions at your doctor’s appointment about potential side effects from Botox injections and ensuring your injector is qualified before your appointment.
