Nursing Michael Jackson
Even as the Las Vegas, NV home and offices of the incompetent, asleep at the swtich Dr. Conrad Murray were being raided, I was having a very interesting conversation with some medical colleagues of Dr. Steven Hoefflin who did (most of) Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeries, including his first or second nose job, depending on who you believe.
Apparently loving the limelight that he got from being associated with celebrities — and Michael certainly wasn’t the only one — Dr. Hoefflin ran afoul of some of his medical associates and staff members, who claimed the doctor liked to look under the sheets of anesthetized patients like Sylvester Stallone and Elizabeth Taylor, who never sued because they didn’t want the publicity, and say and do weird things. (The California State Medical Board found no evidence of wrongdoing, however.)
One of his nurses–we’ll call her Nurse A, left the practice as a result and joined up with another plastic surgeon, who was not only a colleague of Hoefflin’s, but a friend. But when this doctor — we’ll call him Dr. Z. — hired the nurse, that ended their friendship.
Nurse A had first met Michael Jackson in the late 70s, and actually attended to him during the surgery on his scalp after his hair caught on fire during the Pepsi commercial in 1984. She said that Michael was initially taken to Cedars-Sinai but that Hoefflin didn’t have hospital privileges there, so that’s why he ended up at Brotman in Culver City. The surgery was actually performed the morning after the accident, and Nurse A. was stuck in morning rush hour traffic freaking out while listening to reports on the radio. (Jackson later donated the settlement he got from Pepsi to Brotman’s burn center, later renamed the Michael Jackson Burn Center.)
Nurse A., an attractive blonde, got very friendly with Jackson and spent time at Neverland Ranch, riding horses with him on the trails there. She also would often pick him up and take him out in LA to different places. She said he preferred to be with her in just her regular vehicle than a car that would attract attention and that he was often in disguise. She said he was very, very generous, although noting that she herself never got any money from him, but, like so many others have said, that the people around them always had their hands out. She said Michael often visited sick children in the hospital as well as friends who were hospitalized.
He invited her to attend the taping of the “Smooth Criminal” video at Universal and she said she was thrilled to witness it, and hang out in his trailer with him during breaks in the shoot, which went until 4 a.m. She said he was very soft-spoken on set and all the dancers loved him. Nurse A. said she has many, many fond memories of Michael– but that when she was around Joe Jackson, she wanted to take a Brillo pad to herself.
Meanwhile, Doctor Z. estimated that Michael had at least 50 surgeries on his nose and said the singer, whom he also knew, was a sociopath when it came to plastic surgery, a misguided soul who did not know when to stop — — and no one ever really told him to.
