An American woman who went to Mexico for discount skin-tightening surgery has narrated how she woke up to find doctors had given her a boob job and a Brazilian butt lift.
The woman, named Kimberly McCormick, 65, returned to the Mexico Bariatric Center six years after undergoing successful weight-loss surgery at the clinic. But this time, she awoke from surgery with a breast augmentation and butt lift that she had not requested.
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 surgery cost just $13,000 in Mexico whereas they would have cost more than $50,000 in the U.S.
U.S. doctors now say it will cost McCormick a ballpark figure of $75,000 to undo the damage done in Mexico.
She recounted waking up in the hospital and realizing something was wrong as one of her lungs partially collapsed while she was under.
'The leg lift, the arm lift, the breast lift, and the tummy tuck, everything was marked out and ready to go,' she said, referring to the marks her surgeon had made on the body parts that were supposed to be altered.
'I went into surgery at four o'clock in the afternoon. And apparently, I didn't come out of surgery until 1.30 in the morning.'
Her daughter, Misty Ann McCormick, said doctors initially prevented her from visiting her mother after the botched surgery.
She said doctors did not come to see her mother for several days post-op.
When Misty Ann eventually got to her mother's room, she found her in horrifying condition.
Her 'lips were blue' and her 'nose was grey,' she said. Her oxygen tank was not connected.
McCormick said that when she did see a nurse after her surgery, she told her: 'Oh chica, you're so sexy.'
'Well, I'm 65 years old, I'm not a chica and sexy was not my goal,' the patient recalled thinking.
'I was mortified, just mortified.'
When Misty Ann confronted the hospital about what had happened to her mother, she says she was physically removed from the premises by large, armed men.
'I was actually manhandled, beaten with machine guns, kicked in my ribs, kicked between my legs, (and) thrown out of the hospital physically,' she said.
Once outside, she said there were 'probably 15 police officers who rushed up to the giant man' who threw her out. They were 'all speaking Spanish,' she said.
'One stood there with the gun (pointed) at me. I was allowed to get in an Uber, but the police did not help me.'
She added that hospital staff further extorted her and her mother by forcing them to pay an additional $2,500 more than the pre-paid price for the procedures, claiming Kimberly had stayed for a longer-than-anticipated recovery period.
The duo was threatened with arrest and jail if they didn't cough up the cash, and Kimberly was forced to sign a form saying she wanted the unauthorized surgeries she had received.
Misty Ann further added that once she and her mother were back across the U.S. border, American authorities were not any more helpful.
'When we got back to America, we didn't find help. We were laughed at by the San Diego police, who told me to call the Tijuana police - the same police that just machine guns in my cheek,' she said.
When the pair made it back to San Diego, Kimberly went to the ER to receive treatment for a serious infection she had developed after being kept in an unsanitary room at the Mexican hospital.
