Mum's warning after 'cosmetic surgery nightmare' stops her breastfeeding her baby.

In 2013, Perth woman Courtney O’Keefe decided she would get breast implants, believing her weight-loss had made her breasts “look like pancakes”.

Courtney booked a trip to Thailand, then aged 24, with an Australian tour company alongside nine other women and booked her surgery for $7500.

Four years on, after a series of nearly-deadly infections, Courtney has undergone a partial mastectomy to ensure her health.

She is now a mum to a five-month-old daughter. But speaking to 9 News, the 28-year-old said her "cosmetic surgery nightmare" means she is unable to breastfeed her own child.

Courtney said as soon as she was wheeled into theatre at a Bangkok hospital, she began to feel uncomfortable, noticing that the operating room was "dirty".

Almost as soon as her surgery was finished, Courtney fell ill. She was "in agony" by the time she arrived home in Perth, and was rushed to hospital by her mother, where she was placed in quarantine.

LISTEN: Coined as the real life “Barbie”, Kerry is saving to pay for her daughter’s plastic surgery.

After four weeks of suffering through multiple seizures, Courtney's heart, liver, kidneys and brain began to shut down.

Doctors finally determined the 24-year-old had contracted a Thai 'superbug', called pseudomonas aeruginosa, during her breast surgery.

For six months, for every hour of every day, Courtney was given an antibiotic solution to help stem the infection.

A year later, after falling ill again, her breast implants were eventually removed. Doctors believed the superbug had been "festering" inside the implants, and infected tissue from both of her breasts was also removed.

"It makes me feel like less of a woman," Courtney said of her body now.

"That is how you feel when you look down and don't see anything there."

Now, she's urging other Australians who are tempted to book a cheaper surgery overseas to consider other options.

"Someone said to me if you wouldn't drink the water there why the hell would you have surgery there," she said.

"That's so true. So true."