An American woman who traveled to Mexico for discount skin-tightening surgery has described her horror at waking up to find doctors had rebuilt her breasts and performed a Brazilian butt lift.
Kimberly McCormick, 65, returned to the Mexico Bariatric Center six years after undergoing successful weight loss surgery at the clinic.
But this time, she woke up from surgery with a breast augmentation and butt lift that she didn’t ask for.
“I called my daughter bawling, because I woke up with a huge chest, which I would never have wanted if I lived to be 500,” McCormick said in an interview with News Nation.
Kimberly McCormick (left) and her daughter, Misty Ann (right) say they were assaulted and extorted by hospital workers after a botched operation.
McCormick, 65, woke up in Mexico after what was supposed to be skin-tightening surgery following weight loss, to find she had had a boob job and BBL done.
McCormick had returned to the Tijuana hospital to undergo several procedures to remove 90 inches of excess skin following her 150-pound weight loss.
The operation cost only $13,000 in Mexico, while it would have cost more than $50,000 in the United States.
American doctors now say it will cost McCormick some money. approximate figure of $75,000 to repair the damage caused in Mexico.
She said she woke up in the hospital and realized something was wrong as she her lungs partially collapsed while she was depressed.
“The leg lift, the arm lift, the breast lift and the tummy tuck, it was all marked out and ready to be done,” she said, referring to the marks her surgeon had made on parts of the bodies intended to be modified.
“I went to the operating room at four in the afternoon. And apparently, I didn’t get out of the operating room until 1:30 in the morning.
Her daughter, Misty Ann McCormick, said doctors initially stopped her from visiting her mother after the botched operation.
She said doctors did not come to see her mother for several days after the operation.
When Misty Ann managed to reach her mother’s room, she found her in a horrible state.
His “lips were blue” and his “nose was gray,” she said. His oxygen tank was not connected.
McCormick said that when she saw a nurse after her surgery, she told her, “Oh chica, you’re so sexy.”
The Mexico City Bariatric Center, where McCormick had her surgery, is one of the leading medical tourism bariatric surgery hospitals.
“Well, I’m 65, I’m not a chica and sexy wasn’t my goal,” the patient recalls.
“I was mortified, just mortified.”
When Misty Ann spoke at the hospital about what happened to her mother, she said she was physically removed from the scene by large armed men.
“I was actually manhandled, beaten with machine guns, kicked in the ribs, kicked between the legs and (and) physically removed from the hospital,” she said.
Once outside, she said there were “probably 15 police officers rushing towards the giant man” who kicked her out. They “all spoke Spanish,” she said.
“One of them was standing there with the gun (pointed) at me. I was allowed to get into an Uber, but the police did not help me.
She said hospital staff further extorted her and her mother by forcing them to pay an additional $2,500 above the prepaid price for the procedures, claiming Kimberly had stayed during a recovery period. longer than expected.
The duo were threatened with arrest and jail if they didn’t cough up the money, and Kimberly was forced to sign a form saying she wanted the unauthorized surgeries she had undergone.
Misty Ann further added that once she and her mother were back across the US border, the US authorities were no longer of much help.
“When we returned to America, we found no help. We were laughed at by the San Diego police, who told me to call the TIjuana police – the same police who put machine guns in my cheek,” she said.
McCormick, now back in the United States, faces a $75,000 hospital bill to repair his “disfigured” body.
Misty Ann said U.S. police haven’t been much help as mother and daughter try to figure out next steps.
When the couple returned to San Diego, Kimberly went to the emergency room to receive treatment for a serious infection she had developed after being kept in an unsanitary room at the Mexican hospital.
McCormick’s tragic story is an example of the sideways drift of Mexico’s medical tourism industry.
The Bariatric Center of Mexico is one of the largest providers of medical tourism in the world of bariatric surgery: all-inclusive packages are available for international patients traveling to undergo cosmetic surgery at a lower rate than their country of origin. ‘origin.
The medical tourism industry, present in Europe, Asia and North America, is estimated at $70 billion.
