It looks like medieval torture, from the metal rods inserted into sawn bones to the months of agonising recovery. But to some, travelling to Turkey to gain a few inches is a very high price worth paying.
Frank, 38, decided on his honeymoon in Kuala Lumpur that he wanted to be taller. He had confessed to his new wife how much his height bothered him since his teenage years. As a man dedicated to self-improvement, he called a clinic in Turkey that specialises in leg lengthening surgery and made a booking.
“I had a lot of second thoughts – at the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs,” he says, propped up on a hotel bed in Istanbul, his legs splayed in front of him, bracketed by a brace on each thigh. His wife, Emilia, tends to him, fetching painkillers and ice packs. For the first two weeks after surgery, Frank needed her help to get on and off the toilet, but now, six weeks later, it’s largely only to get off the bed.
At 5ft 6in (1.7m) tall, slightly under the average male height worldwide, Frank feels he has lived life “as a short man”. But shortness is relative: men over 6ft have had the procedure. A slim blond woman who was 5ft 3in before surgery deadpans that shortness “is the last acceptable prejudice in society”.
Frank is determined to become taller than Emilia – who is 5ft 5in – by gaining 9cm, just above the 8.5cm doctors told him is the maximum his muscles and tendons can safely handle. This would make him 5ft 9in. His dream is simple: being average height.
Five turns of the key daily means he stands to gain just over a millimetre a day for 10 weeks. “Sometimes the nerve pain wrecks me,” he says. Frank prides himself on being a self-starter: he has the words “self made” tattooed across his knuckles and a likeness of his hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger, on his thigh. “I’m making my own height, choosing how tall I want to be,” he says.
