In her new memoir Unfinished, Priyanka Chopra looks back at the challenges she's faced throughout her 20-year career. An early challenge the now 38-year-old actress face when she was just starting out was a botched surgery that altered her physical appearance.
After experiencing a series of unrelenting head colds, Chopra underwent what was supposed to be a "routine" polypectomy. The surgery was meant to remove a polyp found in Chopra's nasal canal. Unfortunately, something went wrong during the procedure. In Unfinished, Chopra revealed that her doctor “accidentally shaved the bridge of my nose and the bridge collapsed” when he was shaving the polyp.
“My original nose was gone. My face looked completely different. I wasn’t me anymore,” Chopra wrote. The experience left her feeling “devastated and hopeless.”
“Every time I looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at me, and I didn’t think my sense of self or my self-esteem would ever recover from the blow,” Chopra continued. Because of her career put Chopra in the public eye, Chopra also faced cruel backlash for her altered appearance. She lost two roles and another was significantly scaled back as a result of the public outcry.
“My career, a career based so much on physical appearance, seemed to be over before it had even really started,” Chopra, who was a new actress on the scene at the time, wrote. Ultimately, Chopra said she underwent a number of corrective surgeries in an attempt to look like her old self again.
“I’ve gotten accustomed to this face,” Chopra wrote. “Now when I look in the mirror, I am no longer surprised. I’ve made peace with this slightly different me.”
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