The medical tourism global market is set to see pre-Covid rates by the end of 2022 as travel demand continues to rise. Traveling abroad for costly medical procedures, including elective procedures ranging from dental implants to knee replacements, was estimated at a global market cap of 92 billion USD by Patients Beyond Borders in 2019. According to the organization, nearly 2 million Americans traveled overseas and paid out of pocket to achieve their healthcare goals that year.
In a recent interview for GQ, Megan Fox opened up about her struggles with body dysmorphia. Fox is considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, yet she, like myself and most women I know, scrutinizes her appearance to an unhealthy degree. As a former plastic surgery addict, I know what it’s like to constantly chase the high of a new procedure. In the four years since traveling to Colombia as a medical tourist to receive a plethora of cosmetic enhancements, my attitude toward invasive surgery has changed dramatically. Today, I would think twice or even three times before subjecting my body to the risks involved with multiple body-modifying operations done on the cheap.
At 33, I was 5’7” and 112 pounds, which many doctors would classify as underweight. But no matter how much I worked out with a personal trainer, I could never attain the results of models like Emily Ratajowski or Kendall Jenner, whose body parts seemed to defy the laws of gravity. To add to my insecurity, the relationship I had begun with a new boyfriend was amicable at best. He spent most days texting me memes and rarely complimented my appearance. Sometimes he would send me an unprovoked image of actress Alexandra Daddario, his celebrity crush. We looked nothing alike. Her ample chest seemed to balloon larger and larger, until it took up the entirety of my phone’s screen. I’d hastily delete the pictures and try not to consider the implications of his behavior or my unhappiness.
When a friend mentioned that an unassuming coworker of hers had returned a “literal swan” after a trip abroad as a medical tourist, I was intrigued. I worried about the dangers of traveling alone to a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language, let alone doing so for invasive surgery, so I didn’t dare admit that I’d consider it too.
I was feeling listless and unsure of my life’s trajectory. My dreams of becoming a novelist were dashed after realizing that I didn’t have the discipline to work on my own. My dead-end retail and service-industry jobs involved long hours during which I checked out mentally. I noticed how my superiors often took a shine to bubbly, attractive girls because they did so well with clients. I was introverted and hid behind my tattoos and dark hair. Hardly anyone noticed me. The optimism I once felt about “everything working out” during my 20s was replaced by nagging FOMO as I robotically scrolled through the social media pages of beautiful, successful women. I watched as their scantily clad images racked up hundreds of thousands of likes. To my surprise, many positive comments came from other women my age: #bodygoals or a combination of fire and heart-eyed emojis followed every photo. I equated their physical beauty with opportunity, and I hoped changing my appearance would catapult me out of the service industry forever.
I decided I could improve my chances of success by altering the things I didn’t like about my appearance. I couldn’t pinpoint just one feature that I disliked, but I also couldn’t count on one hand the number of times someone said, “Oh, I didn’t see you there” or “you just kind of blend into the background.” I wanted someone to see me. After consulting with a local plastic surgeon in New York City, I rattled off my wish list for a more toned stomach, thinner thighs, a smaller waistline, and a more ample derriere. I watched in horror as his patient coordinator circled in red the combined cost for my proposed metamorphosis. All I could see were the countless zeros that crowded the page. Defeated, I left the office, trying to figure out how I could afford surgery without robbing a bank. I would have had to stop eating or paying rent for two years in order to afford full body liposuction, a fat transfer, a BBL, and the breast augmentation the doctor suggested, which totaled just under $50,000. There was no way I could attain my dream body and, by extension, my dream life on my meager salary as a sales associate at a downtown boutique. Although I didn’t want to become an actress or a model, I wanted to look like one—and more important, I wanted to have the platform they possessed. I was certain that their boyfriends were genuinely interested in them too. I felt stuck. I tried to forget about the consultation and went back to my banal routine.
Months later, when a new acquaintance unexpectedly called me to express her desire to travel abroad for plastic surgery and invited me along, I felt like I’d found my golden ticket. We hired a facilitator named Marisol, who acted as a liaison between doctors abroad and patients in the U.S. Neither of us had any experience with medical tourism, and we decided to go to Colombia only because another friend’s mother had previously worked with Marisol. She reassured us that the process was safe and even shared photos of her complete body makeover. The surgeons were reputable doctors the facilitator worked with regularly. Impatient and impetuous, we booked whoever had the earliest availability without carefully reviewing their work. Marisol helped arrange our money wires to pay for the surgeries and our two weeks of room and board in a recovery house. For around $6,000, we each paid for full body liposuction and Brazilian butt lifts, including all aftercare. We’d have an on-call nurse, prepared meals, and a maid. It was exhilarating to find out that our total was only a tiny fraction of what I was quoted in New York. Suddenly, becoming beautiful didn’t seem like an impossible hurdle, and I felt relieved knowing I wouldn’t have to go through the process alone.
Marisol offered to bring down the cost even more if we got a third person to join, so my friend’s roommate was enlisted at the last minute. Both girls were millennials who dabbled in plastic surgery the way other women changed their hair. Neither seemed alarmed about traveling abroad to undergo revisions of their previous botched operations. One girl had irregular lumps and bumps from liposuction she wanted corrected, while the other had gained weight and felt that this obscured her original results. Aside from a “rite-of-passage” nose job in my early 20s that left me with a profile I hated, I was the cosmetic surgery novice in our group.
The three of us ordered every supplement we could find on Amazon that promised a smooth and speedy recovery. After last-minute purchases of sweatpants, snacks at Trader Joe’s, and two weeks’ worth of books and magazines, we were off. We landed in Cali, Colombia, and were met at the airport by a business associate of Marisol’s who drove us to the home we would spend the next two weeks recovering in. The suburban streets of Cali were quaint and reminded me of a neighborhood in Miami I frequented when visiting my grandparents. Toucans and parrots squawked overhead, but otherwise, our street could’ve been anywhere. It wasn’t until I had a closer look at the metal bars affixed to every window that our new reality began to sink in.
The following day, we were driven to meet with our respective surgeons and undergo in-person consultations. While both doctors had similar aesthetic tastes, I opted to go with the surgeon who had a reputation for being more conservative. I watched as the surgeon used markers on my friends’ bodies and mapped out their futures. Both women desired nearly cartoonish proportions for their revamped selves. I wondered aloud if that was a wise decision long-term. “If it goes out of style, I’ll just lipo [the fat] back out,” one girl quipped. I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way. After seeing countless patients with the same rock-hard breast implants awaiting their follow-ups with the doctor, I started to worry about whether the aesthetic principles upheld in Colombia meshed with my desire for subtle work.
But buoyed by my friends’ confidence, I went ahead with my consultation. Under the glare of harsh fluorescent lights, I stood naked in front of the doctor, aghast at what I saw in the mirror. Somehow I looked even worse than I remembered. I kept finding new body parts to tweak, without hesitating at what felt like record-low prices. My final package included full body liposuction, and a BBL plus the labiaplasty and fat grafting to my cheeks, chin, and jawline I’d just decided on. The doctor listened dutifully but didn’t bother counseling me about having realistic expectations for what modern medicine could achieve. After undergoing lab work that cleared us for surgery, we were all shuttled to our doctors. Everything happened so quickly, we had no time to sit with our decisions.
The next two weeks were a blur. My friends and I spent most of our days in excruciating pain alleviated only by strong painkillers administered by the nurse. One day, my blood pressure dropped dangerously low as I began to lose consciousness, yet no one thought to take me to the hospital. I was given salty snacks and Gatorade to drink. Mostly bedridden, I had to waddle around the property in a restrictive bodysuit that the nurse helped me peel off for showers. Our bodies resembled Jackson Pollock paintings: our flesh was splattered in shades of crimson, dark purple, and yellowing bruises that were painful to the touch. Twice a day, we were shuttled to appointments for lymphatic drainage massages so excruciating we could hear each other cry out for our mothers. This was followed by sessions in a barometric oxygen chamber, where my mind raced as I considered what I had done. During this time, my boyfriend hardly checked in on me—and I grew increasingly despondent. We spent our evenings trading stories about men who had broken our hearts and laughing at the cruelty of it all as we clutched our sides. It was too painful to laugh.
When I returned home, my boyfriend broke up with me over text before I even had the chance to heal physically. There was no grand reveal of my brand-new perfect body, like I had fantasized about. I wore the binding bodysuit religiously for the next three months, although there were no longer any nurses to help me in and out of it. I was thinner, but the baggy clothes I normally wore made it impossible for anyone in my life to notice. When I assessed my final results months later, I discovered new complications from my procedures, like prominent banana rolls under my buttocks and an overly dissected abdomen. The fat transfer to my face didn’t create the movie-star contours I had envisioned either. Instead, it gave my once thin face a fullness that registered as Martian-like.
My feelings of inadequacy didn’t immediately go away after I returned from Colombia; instead, I realized that when I felt better about myself, people at work noticed me. In therapy, I learned that I unconsciously sought out people who feared commitment so as not to get rejected. Until I dealt with my lack of confidence, my life would never improve, no matter how much plastic surgery I underwent.
Cultivating the life I wanted meant I had to invest in more than just my physical appearance. I started taking writing classes again and actually submitting my work. While I’ve grown to accept my post-procedure body and face, the fat transfer results have thankfully dissipated over the years. I still struggle with periods of an unhealthy preoccupation with my looks when I’m stressed, but I’ve learned to quiet these voices with the help of therapy and my renewed interest in self-expression. Through writing, I’m able to examine how my feelings of self-worth are inextricably linked to my desire to change my looks. Recently, a prominent plastic surgeon I consulted with said, “We’re all melting,” in regards to the changes in my appearance I was beginning to notice. Nothing in life remains stagnant, and there’s no use in trying to halt time. By embracing the aging process and taking better care of my body and head, I’ve made peace with it all.
I wish I had spent more time weighing the pros and cons of these surgeries before acting out impulsively. I had tried to use them to fill the gaping hole in my self-esteem but discovered that the hole was bottomless. There was always a new feature or body part that could be enhanced or diminished if I wanted. Reevaluating my life’s priorities at 36 and surrounding myself with people who appreciate me has been a better salve for that. None of us knew then that Brazilian butt lifts are considered to be one of the most dangerous cosmetic procedures, due to the number of nerves and arteries present in the gluteal region. At the time, I believed that I would have done anything to achieve my desired outcome, but I didn’t realize I was gambling with my life. I wanted so badly for the modified bodies I saw on social media to be real, that I missed the telltale signs of Photoshop and filters that were right in front of me. Today, I know that most of the results I desire can be achieved with a conservative amount of filler, lasers, and a discerning plastic surgeon’s eye. When that doesn’t work, there’s always FaceTune.
