20-year-old Victorian woman suffers cardiac arrest during cosmetic surgery.

Amy’s breast augmentation surgery went horribly, scarily wrong. Now, the cause might have been revealed.

When 20-year-old Amy Rickhuss was wheeled into surgery at The Cosmetic Institute in Sydney, she probably assumed her breast augmentation procedure would be straightforward and relatively low-risk.

But the Parramatta surgery took a terrifying turn when Ms Rickhuss went into cardiac arrest towards the end of the January 30 procedure — meaning her heart literally stopped beating while she was lying on the table.

The then 20-year-old woman had to be stabilised before being rushed to Westmead Hospital in western Sydney. There, she thankfully woke up feeling “dazed” but stable, according to the Courier Mail.

She has since recovered, and has spoken to the media of her experiences in the hope of encouraging “other girls not to be afraid”.

Related: Stacey was delighted with her new breasts. Until three years later.

At the time, the scary incident was said to be a strange “reaction”: The Cosmetic Institute managing director David Segal told News Ltd media in January the incident was “suspected to be an unusual reaction to the local anaesthetic”.

“What happened yesterday was an extremely rare and isolated incident,” he said.

But now, Fairfax Media reports reports it appears likely that Rickhuss was given an overdose of local anaesthetic.

As Fairfax reports, Rickhuss was given intralipid during the surgery — a drug used to treat “local anaesthetic systemic toxicity”, according to Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists safety expert Phillipa Hore.

“It is either an overdose or a smaller dose that has been inadvertently injected into a blood vessel,” Dr Hore told Fairfax.

But The Cosmetic Institute anaesthetist Dr Erez Ben-Menachem previously old Fairfax Media it was “highly unlikely” the local anaesthetic was injected into a blood vessel, given the delayed reaction in Ms Rickhuss’ case.

Ms Rickhuss, who is from regional Victoria but works in a fly-in-fly-out mining job based in Perth, has previously written of the incident online, urging others not to fear similar complications.

“[I] have tried to be honest and tell my story and encourage other girls not to be afraid just because of what happened to me,” she wrote on Facebook in February.

“It was an extremely unusual occurrence that could have happened on any operating table anywhere. ”

She also said she has been given anaesthetic since the frightening incident without experiencing any adverse reaction at all.

As she told Fairfax: “I’ve been to a cardiologist and there is nothing wrong with my heart at all.”

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