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Matamoros, Mexico, is known as a hotbed of drug cartel violence.
But blood-thirsty gangsters are not the region’s only threat.
Rogue plastic surgeons, offering cut-rate cosmetic procedures, can also be brutal.
Weeks after Rita Rodriguez, a 49-year-old mom of three in Texas, underwent a so-called “mommy makeover” at a Matamoros clinic, she found herself at death’s door.
“My body burned with a high fever; stitches from my tummy tuck came loose while my breasts [with fresh implants] were hot to the touch,” Rodriguez, a TSA employee, told The Post of the 2021 ordeal. “So much fluid was draining from an incision in my leg that I needed maxipads to soak it up,”
Her package, which also included 360 liposuction and butt fillers, came at a cost of nearly $15,000.
“Soon after, I went for my bloodwork,” said Rodriguez who suffers from anemia and gets checked regularly in the US. “My doctor saw the wound in my leg and sent me to the ER.”
At the hospital, Rodriguez recalled, “I was told that if I had waited eight more hours, I would have died. Sepsis kicked in. My blood was being poisoned by whatever the hell was leaking from inside my breasts and leg.”
She underwent surgery to remove the blood pocket causing the infection and was discharged after nearly a week.
Despite the CDC advising Americans to “cancel any elective procedure that involves an epidural injection of an anesthetic in Matamoros,” some 1.2 million Americans still flock from the States to clinics there and elsewhere in Mexico each year.
Business is so booming that there’s a transportation service to take patients from Brownsville to Matamoros via the BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) Wagon: a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van illustrated on its side with a needle injecting a 6-foot-high cartoon butt.
Patients can save 40 to 60% over the cost of similar procedures in the US.
But some 200 US residents who recently underwent surgery in Mexico risked exposure to fungal meningitis, a potentially fatal infection.
So far, around two dozen have contracted it after receiving apparently tainted epidural anesthesia for elective cosmetic surgery; according to the CDC, four people died soon after as a result.
But even a simple nose job can go awry.
When Laura Avila, a realtor from Dallas, visited Mexico for a rhinoplasty in 2018, an anesthesia foul-up caused severe brain damage.
She was taken to a Mexican hospital — and not allowed to leave for medical care in the US until the hospital bill was paid.
Weeks later, Avila died.
Kanisha Davis, a nurse in Long Beach, California, was left projectile vomiting after a faulty liposuction/tummy-tuck in 2021.
But her friend, Keuana Weaver, died on the operating table.
When Shannyn Palmer traveled from Vancouver, Washington, to Tijuana for a tummy tuck last year, she lost parts of two fingers in the bargain.
It was due to the inappropriate use of heated saline bags during the procedure.
“My boys thought I was turning into a zombie when my fingers were turning black [from the burn],” Palmer told The Post.
These problems from Mexico help to keep American surgeons busy.
“People come to this office every week for revisionist surgery,” Dr. Monica Wentworth, a plastic surgeon based in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, told The Post. “I see patients with breast implants that have been draining for several days. Pus comes out of the incision and the doctor in Mexico prescribes antibiotics instead of going in, removing the implant, washing the tissue and letting it heal.
“There is a lack of care.”
And when things go awry, getting them corrected sometimes becomes difficult, as doctors in the States can be reluctant to help Americans who got botched in Mexico.
MDs in Matamoros, meanwhile, can be dismissive.
“They’ll block your number if you bug them,” said Wentworth. “Cross the border for an elective procedure and you put yourself at grave risk. Don’t sacrifice your life because you want it [cosmetic procedures] at a lower cost.”
Justine Rodriguez, of Idaho, almost sacrificed her life for bariatric surgery in Tijuana.
Discussing the complications, she told Fox News Digital, “My lungs collapsed. My kidneys and my liver were going. The infection went to my brain.”
In the recent case of patients who contracted fungal meningitis in Mexico, the infections can possibly be traced to shortages of the usual epidural medication.
Dr. Tom Chiller, who heads up the fungal diseases branch of the CDC, told NBC News: “There could be some bad actors in that space who are essentially operating sort of a black-market type of morphine business.”
Beyond that, augmented breasts can be a game of roulette.
“Implant selection may be limited to what is available in Mexico instead of what patients desire,” said Wentworth. “For reasons that are never made clear, you may wind up with a DD cup when you decided on a C.”
Though Rodriguez’s doctor in Mexico promised “not to make [her] look like Jessica Rabbit,” he implanted her with D-sized breasts, she claimed.
Her health remains dicey — “I still have fevers in the middle of the night” — and she is still dealing with emotional issues that came with the surgery.
“I received blue stitches in my stomach and they remain visible; I hate seeing them,” said Rodriguez. “I have to make sure my tops go high enough to hide scarring [near her breasts]. For my 31st high school reunion, I found a dress that went up to my neck. I’m angry. This [surgeon] ruined me. It is something I wish I had never done.”
A Texas healthcare professional, 45, admitted to The Post that she should have known better than to go south for surgery.
When complications — her breasts turned red, her temperature spiked, color drained from her face — arose after her surgery, she avoided discussing it with doctors she knew from work.
“I was embarrassed,” said the healthcare professional, who asked to withhold her name for career reasons. “They would have told me that I shouldn’t have done it.”
But a physician she worked with clocked her sallow skin color and insisted she go to the hospital.
Once there, a doctor made an incision in her breast. “Fluid that came out was brown — it was like chocolate milk,” the healthcare professional told The Post. “I knew I had an infection, but I didn’t know how bad it was. They removed the implants and I was on antibiotics for six weeks.”
The root of the complication was as disturbing as the discharged fluid: “I had a bacterial infection. The doctor used dirty instruments,” she claimed. “It was the kind of bacteria that you find in feces.”
The woman’s sister, who went under the knife in Mexico at the same time, endured her own issues.
“She had dying tissue on her breast and it left a big scar,” the healthcare professional said. “That same week, a lady died while getting plastic surgery in Matamoros.”
She admitted that she and her sister were both drawn down there by the bargain prices.
“I was being quoted $16,000 [for breast implants in the US] and got them done for $3,500 in Mexico,” said the healthcare professional. “I had my breasts redone in San Antonio for $6,000. The experience was good. To people wanting to go to Mexico for plastic surgery, I advise saving up and getting the work done here.”
But the lure of vanity is so strong that at least one woman, a 42-year-old Texas teacher who normally avoids going to Matamoros even for dinner, steeled herself for a plastic surgery trip last year.
She signed on for liposuction and a tummy tuck — and got talked into letting the doctor inject stomach fat into her buttocks.
Waking up from anesthesia, the teacher said, “I felt like I had been hit by a dump truck. I thought that was part of the recovery.”
It got worse once she returned to the US.
“I threw up whenever I ate and my skin was gray. I saw a doctor friend and his nurse thought I was going to die,” recalled the teacher, who asked to withhold for reasons of privacy. ” I went to the ER. The first surgeon there didn’t want to work on me. They don’t want the liability of you dying on their table. He said, ‘We’re not going to touch you.’”
With her stomach “puffing up like a softball,” she was referred to Dr. Wentworth.
“Dr. Wentworth opened me up and saw that the doctor in Mexico forgot to sew the top part of my stomach,” said the teacher. “It was like they didn’t finish. Dr. Wentworth scraped out a pocket of blood and completed the job.”
Scariest of all, the teacher found out that her butt injection could have been fatal.
“If they injected me two millimeters to the left, the fat would have gone into a vein that leads to my heart,” she claimed. “They should have never injected so close to that vein. It would have killed me instantly.”
Looking back, she said, “If I had to do this again, I would not do it in Mexico. After what I went through, I’m grateful to be alive.”
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