As a short person, there have been plenty of moments when I’ve felt a few extra inches could be helpful. Either in a social situation or in a practical way, such as being able to reach an item on a high shelf.
I could fix that if I had the temerity and the money, like a man named “Frank” did in a feature article published in The Guardian.
At 5’6”, Frank had spent most of his life absorbing the passive-aggressive jabs society lobs at short men. So, in the spirit of self-improvement, he picked up the phone and booked a procedure in Turkey that required breaking both his femurs.
It’s around here that I, a man standing at a proud 5’4”, throw up my hands and say no thank you. But for other men, like Frank, shattering your femurs is a small price to pay to be a little bit taller.
There’s also a big financial price to pay. In Frank’s case, it was $32,000. He spent that money on a Turkish clinic called Wanna Be Taller. Normally, a new, highly sought-after cosmetic procedure has to trickle down to strip mall levels of ubiquity before it can take on a cutesy name like that, but Turkish doctors are heading straight for it with reckless abandon.
This Guy Dropped $32K to Get His Legs Broken and Made Taller
Wanna Be Taller specializes in leg lengthening, and the only way to make your legs longer is to literally crack your bones in half and then keep those bones separated with metal rods running along the sides of your legs. At the same time, your body slowly fills in the gap with new bone, one excruciating millimeter at a time.
Frank had a desperation to be taller than I, an even shorter person than Frank, that I had never once felt in the entirety of my life. That desperation drove him to endure five key turns of his leg braces a day instead of the usual four, as he aims to grow nine centimeters even though doctors only recommend 8.5.
An alarm reminds him to turn a key that lengthens the rods. At one point in the article, to the shriek of the alarm, Frank’s wife Emelia responds with a jovial “time to grow!”
Recovery is as brutal as you could imagine. Frank can barely straighten his legs. Each physio session feels like torture. He’s taking painkillers, blood thinners, and icing puncture wounds daily. He says the nerve pain is excruciating.
A Schwarzenegger tattoo on his thigh is now being stretched like silly putty. He’s doing all of this because Frank is chasing some semblance of normalcy in a society that values height for purely aesthetic reasons.
Height surgery is booming. One estimate cited by The Guardian predicts that the industry will hit $8.6 billion globally by 2030, as short kings around the world plunk down tens of thousands of dollars to relinquish their Short King crowns to become marginally taller. Not tall—just taller. The procedure won’t turn a little guy like me into the next Victor Wembanyama.
The risks of the procedure are pretty real. A Saudi patient died from a post-op blood clot. Frank nearly joined him, waking up one night gasping for air from a pulmonary embolism. Turns out he needed more potent blood thinners. And even after surviving that, his tendons couldn’t keep up—his fixators had to come off early.
After all that, Frank almost got what he was looking for. He made it to 5’8.9”. Just shy of average. Just tall enough to look down on his wife for the first time. He grew a little less than three inches, and all it took was an incredible amount of pain and $32,000, some of which was money originally intended for a down payment on a mortgage.
Hope he likes the view.
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