Priyanka Chopra is getting candid about a lot of thing in her life in her new book, Unfinished: A Memoir – including how a “pretty routine” medical procedure ended up almost ruining her acting career.
Priy was on top of the world when won Miss World back in 2000. However, in excerpts of her book published by People, she recounts how one botched medical procedure left her feeling “devastated and hopeless” just a year after that – right when her career in showbiz was beginning to take off.
It started when she developed a “lingering head cold” sometime in the summer of 2001. At first, she didn’t think much of it, believing it was just some sort of sinus infection. But, when Priy, who also suffers from asthma, began to have trouble breathing, she became concerned and went to see a doctor.
“I was having trouble breathing. This is a problem someone with asthma can’t ignore,” she wrote.
Turns out, there was a “polyp in my nasal cavity that would need to be surgically removed.”
Still no biggie, right? It’s a treatable condition – and she wasn’t really that concerned because removing the polyp, also called a polypectomy, “sounded like a pretty routine procedure.”
Unfortunately, it became one of those things that totally did not go as planned.
“While shaving off the polyp, the doctor also accidentally shaved the bridge of my nose and the bridge collapsed. When it was time to remove the bandages and the condition of my nose was revealed, Mom and I were horrified. My original nose was gone. My face looked completely different. I wasn’t me anymore,” she wrote in her memoir.
Priy opened up about how the damage from the procedure 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,” she wrote.
The media didn’t make it easy for her either – she even got an unflattering nickname: Plastic Chopra.
“Let’s just call it out right now. Immediately the name started to show up in articles and newspaper items and it has followed me my entire professional life,” she went on.
She also got candid about undergoing multiple corrective procedures over the years to “normalize” her appearance – but she eventually learned to embrace her new look.
“While it took a few years … I’ve gotten accustomed to this face. Now when I look in the mirror, I am no longer surprised; I’ve made peace with this slightly different me,” she explained. “This is my face. This is my body. I might be flawed, but I am me.”
Unfinished: A Memoir is Priy’s debut as an author – a project that began two years before quarantine. She made the most from the unexpected down time amid the pandemic to finish her writing her memoir.
“There’s literally every year of my life in this book, which is why I’m so nervous,” she previously told People. “This is me baring open, from the time I was a kid to when I got into pageants and what that felt like as someone who had no experience of the pageant world, and then being thrown into the Bollywood system and wanting to change my career path in my 30s, which is [a time when] girls are told it’s beyond our prime to start all over again. I’ve had to push against the norm a lot through my whole life, and I discuss that in-depth.”
