Former Dr. Roxy patients say she hurt them years before she was TikTok famous

When Katharine Roxanne Grawe came to the Columbus area 18 years ago, she never could have guessed how her career would eventually take off or that it would come crashing down in the public eye.

Grawe, who became more commonly known as the plastic surgeon "Dr. Roxy," gained notoriety for broadcasting procedures right from the operating room on TikTok.

In the process, Grawe wound up injuring patients — both when her camera was on and off, according to the State Medical Board of Ohio. Neither she nor her attorney Sabrina Sellers responded to multiple requests for comment.

Grawe was born in San Diego, California, and earned a bachelor's degree in biology and psychology from Southern Methodist University. She earned her medical degree at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas, and came to Columbus in 2005 to complete a residency through Ohio State University, according to medical board records.

“I knew her well. She was one of my former residents," said Susan Vasko, a plastic surgeon in private practice who worked with Grawe during her residency at Ohio State. "It's just a sad situation because she was a very talented surgeon, a good person, and an intelligent surgeon.”

About 12 years after Grawe finished her Ohio State residency in 2010, the state medical board suspended her medical license in November 2022, then permanently revoked it in July.

While Grawe's medical career came to an end just a few months ago, several patients who the doctor operated on long before she achieved TikTok stardom, told The Dispatch that she hurt them too.

Grawe sued for malpractice long before she became a TikTok star

When Mary Jenkins woke up from her breast reconstruction in a hospital bed at Mount Carmel St. Ann's in October 2012, she thought everything was fine.

But hours later, the now-55-year-old cancer survivor's reconstructed right breast began to swell and the doctor who performed her surgery ordered what Jenkins, then a resident of Columbus' North Side, felt like was an unthinkable treatment — leeches.

Grawe had ordered treatment with the bloodsucking, wormlike parasite to bring the swelling down in Jenkins breast. There was still a problem though, as no one at the hospital knew how to perform the treatment, Jenkins said.

"Roxanne Grawe ordered me to have leech therapy, but there was no one that knew how to do it ... so my friend ... literally Googled how to do leech therapy," Jenkins said. "That's how she learned how to do it, and she was the one that put the leeches on."

A spokesperson for Mount Carmel declined to comment on Jenkins's treatment.

The leeches didn't help reduce the swelling and Jenkins said she was taken back into surgery in order to drain the blood from her reconstructed breast.

After the second surgery, Jenkins stayed in the hospital for about a week before Grawe suggested she go stay in a nursing home to avoid coming down with an infection. Jenkins said she agreed and went to stay at a nursing home near her house.

Once at the nursing home, Jenkins felt like she wasn't getting any better. She was on heavy painkillers and routinely suffered from intense fevers and chills.

Jenkins noticed black spots forming on her reconstructed right breast.

At first, she thought it was like when she would fall off her bike as a kid and scrape her knee. She thought the spots would eventually fall off like a scab and new tissue would form.

But that's not what happened. Jenkin's breast had become necrotic and was dying, she said.

Read More: Dr. Roxy: The Dispatch's coverage of the rise and fall of the TikTok doc

"It started getting worse when the tissue started falling forward to where I could look down and actually see my ribs," Jenkins said.

One night, Jenkins said she woke up to a woman standing at the foot of her bed in the nursing home. The woman, who told Jenkins she was a nurse, said that Jenkins needed to have the tissue removed right away or it would kill her.

The next day, Jenkins said she called Grawe and demanded the doctor remove the breast she had reconstructed. Grawe resisted at first, Jenkins said, and wanted to wait a week.

Jenkins insisted though and Grawe removed it. She went on to file a malpractice lawsuit against Grawe in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas in April 2014

The lawsuit stated Grawe's attempts to address Jenkins' complications with leech therapy rather than surgery, "were professionally negligent and fell well below accepted standards of medical care."

The ordeal left Jenkins with "a gaping hole in her chest that required extensive wound therapy," according to a pre-trial statement filed by her attorney in court. Jenkins was equipped with what she called a "wound vac" that prevented fluid from pooling in her wound and spent four months in a nursing home recovering.

A jury awarded Jenkins more than $358,00 in damages in 2016. Grawe appealed the decision and lost, court records show.

While the victory was nice, Jenkins said there was one thing she wanted more — Grawe's medical license. That wouldn't come for eight more years though.

“I don't care about the money; I care that she is not able to do this (to) anybody else ever again ..." Jenkins said. "Unfortunately, the medical board didn't make a decision to discipline her (then)."

Breast reconstruction became never-ending nightmare for 1 patient

Beth Benadum couldn't believe what she was reading.

She'd been flipping through the pages of The Dispatch on a day in late April 2016 when she saw a headline about a jury awarding Jenkin's money for a botched breast reconstruction.

Without even looking, Benadum, now 55, of Dublin, knew who the surgeon was.

Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe, she thought to herself.

She was right.

Years had passed since Benadum said Grawe had botched her own breast reconstruction. Benadum said she looked into filing a lawsuit against the doctor, but Ohio's one-year statute of limitations on medical malpractice claims prevented her from doing so once she realized she'd been wronged.

"I tried to (file) a lawsuit and found out that it was too late because I waited until I was finally put back together," Benadum said.

Benadum had gone to see Grawe in 2014 after deciding to have a double mastectomy. She'd tested positive for the BRCA gene, a known precursor to breast cancer and her own mom died at a young age from the disease.

Grawe at the time was doing immediate breast reconstruction after a mastectomy. Benadum went through with the double mastectomy and reconstruction in April 2014.

And while the operations seemed to go well, what followed were four infections of Benadum's left breast over the following 10 months that she said were the result of Grawe's work. At one point, she had to give herself drip IV antibiotics for six weeks.

Finally, after her fourth infection appeared on Feb. 1, 2015, Benadum had enough. She called another doctor and had the implant removed.

“I said 'I don't care what you have to do. Get me in somewhere, get this out of me. ... She's never touching me again,'" Benadum said about Grawe. "And the next day was 'Groundhog Day'. So that was like the running joke."

It took 10 surgeries inside 21 months to correct what Benadum said Grawe did to her.

But before Benadum could have her reconstruction fixed, she said she had to go six months without a left breast so she could heal and get rid of the infection. Those six months felt like a cruel joke to Benadum, who had tried to avoid going without a reconstruction in the first place.

"It was like when you think you've hit rock bottom, and then you find out there's a basement," Benadum said. "It was a dark time for me."

Although Benadum saw the story about the lawsuit that Jenkins had filed against Grawe in The Dispatch, she tried to move on. She wasn't paying the plastic surgeon any attention when she discovered in 2020 that Grawe had become internet famous.

Despite everything Benadum said she went through as a result of her botched breast reconstruction, she said there was one silver lining to it all.

On her last visit to see Grawe, Benadum said she was taken to an exam room she hadn't been in before. On one wall of the room, was a sign with the words "Today I will choose joy."

While it was Grawe who Benadum said caused her so much suffering, the sign in the plastic surgeon's office gave her motivation to get through all of the infections and surgeries that followed.

Since then, the word "joy" has become Benadum's go-to mantra. All around her house are signs with the word in them and it was once even on her car's license plate.

“I tried to go through all of this, find the joy in it and think, 'OK, there is a lesson in this ...'" Benadum said, holding back tears. "It's a choice. And if I didn't make that choice, I never would have survived."

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mfilby@dispatch.com

@MaxFilby

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Dr. Roxy accused of botching surgeries before she was a TikTok star