When Colin Hendry’s wife told him she was considering having liposuction, he said he’d support her although he loved her just as she was.
“Denise was beautiful, inside and out,” he said at the inquest into her death last week.
The couple had never imagined the procedure would eventually lead to her death, at just 43, seven years later. But despite the devastation it wrought upon his family life, the former footballer is not opposed to cosmetic surgery.
“I have nothing against it; if a woman wants it or feels she needs it to make herself feel good or more confident, that’s her choice,” he says. “What I would say is the industry needs tougher regulation and that people need to be held accountable if anything goes wrong.”
Hendry captained Scotland in the 1998 World Cup and has played for Rangers and Blackburn Rovers. He knew that his wife of 25 years, the mother of their four children — now aged between 11 and 21 — would never exercise to get into shape. “I was all for fitness, fitter than a butcher’s dog, I was,” he says. “She wasn’t into all that. She didn’t have time for fitness bringing up four kids. She liked a cigarette and she liked a drink, although she didn’t drink every day.”
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Denise had the £3,000 operation on April 10, 2002 at the private Broughton Park hospital near their home in Preston, Lancashire. They were told by the surgeon, Gustav Aniansson, that she would be able to walk home the next day. In fact, Aniansson botched the operation, perforating Denise’s bowel nine times. By Saturday she was on a life-support machine at the NHS Royal Preston hospital.
After three months she was sent home “with continuing medical problems”, the inquest was told. In 2007 she needed another operation to remove the mesh that had been inserted to replace her damaged abdominal wall. That, too, went wrong. She ended up being fed intravenously and was fitted with a colostomy bag.
“When she’d get down and upset, she’d want something to eat, or we’d arrange to meet friends for a glass of wine. She’d have been looking forward to it, but it would make the bag burst and she’d come back from the ladies and say, ‘We’ve got to go’. Can you imagine how humiliating that was for her? She kept a lot of her worries in here, though,” Hendry says, tapping his head.
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In 2009 she was admitted to hospital with pressure on her brain and died on July 10.
Hendry looks exhausted. Still fit at 45, he is in a dark suit, sipping coffee in the Preston hotel where he says he does all his business. He hasn’t been “properly at home” for 24 hours because he was presenting on ESPN, the sports channel, in London the night before. But he’s used to it: “Every week’s a busy week when you’re a single parent.”
In the final three months of her life Denise was barely conscious. On her 43rd birthday, five days before she died, the family decorated her hospital room but it wasn’t really a celebration: “She wasn’t responding at all. The little ones, the youngest two, never visited all that much. I was trying to protect them.”
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Hendry remembers when the doctor broke the news: “He put his hands on her bedframe and said, ‘She’s not going to live’. I lost it at that point.”
He leaves the room to dry his tears. When he returns, he says: “It’s the first time I’ve spoken about it in over a year.”
It’s his way of coping, keeping gruff. In the past he has turned to alcohol: “I’ve drunk more than I should have, it’s a way of escape.” He also started gambling and was sued by a friend and neighbour, Hector McFarlane, who had lent him £85,000.
Hendry has since sold his £1m Victorian mansion and lives in a smaller house down the road. He was declared bankrupt in 2010. It’s clear the lessons of the past decade have hurt. “I’m not going to talk about the bankruptcy but I will say, when I’ve done wrong, I’ve been punished. What about Aniansson? I bet he’s got a nice, fine life. With kids and a wife.”
Because Aniansson had left the country, the coroner had no powers to make him attend the inquest. The NHS doctors who treated Denise after the botched operation, however, told the inquest they were “disgusted” by Aniansson’s handiwork. In early 2003, one doctor tried to report him to the General Medical Council, but he was found to have removed himself from the British medical register, an act Hendry calls “total cowardice”.
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Aniansson is thought to have fled to his native Sweden, where he is listed as a “plastic surgeon specialist” on the website for Nackakliniken, a private clinic near Stockholm.
Three months after Denise’s death, Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, reported that Aniansson was under investigation. A woman named Linda Blomberg had claimed a breast enhancement performed by him left her with disfiguring scars, while a man described how his buttock implants had burst. No one at Nackakliniken would comment when contacted by The Sunday Times.
“I struggle to find the right word to describe him. Butcher? Cowboy?” says Hendry. “It’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to continue working in the profession.”