Quebec woman’s botched breast lift in Colombia highlights dangers of cosmetic surgery tourism

Warning: this article contains graphic images.

A Quebec woman is warning against cosmetic surgery tourism after she went to Colombia for a breast lift because it was cheaper.

She now calls it the worst decision of her life.

Five years ago, Alexandra Denis-Bérubé found out she had a benign tumour in one of her breasts, and she was put on a wait list for surgery that would have taken four to five years.

She decided to try the private system and found out the cost for removing the tumour, plus a lift, was $16,000.

A friend then recommended she consider getting the procedure done in Colombia.

“When you’re at the grocery store and you have to have two different apples that look the same, you will choose automatically the cheaper one, so this is why I took this decision,” she said.

The surgery in Colombia costs just $3,000, but she quickly found out she wasn’t comparing apples to apples.

“When I arrived in Quebec, all the complications arrived at the same time,” said Denis-Bérubé.

The surgeon, it turns out, used non-dissolving stitches, which her body began rejecting. One by one, the stitches started to come out through her now-reopened wounds.

“All of my scars are open, so it took five months to close them,” said Denis-Bérubé.

At the same time, she was dealing with complications from a second procedure called a Brazilian butt lift, or BBL.

An infection caused serious bruising on her hips and stomach.

“I would say 90 per cent — nine-zero — of our patients that we see complications of plastic surgery come from abroad,” said plastic surgeon Dr. Hani Sinno.

Sinno is not involved in Denis-Bérubé’s case, but said the cosmetic tourism trend has taken off on social media and he’s seen an increase in the number of hospitalizations due to complications.

“This doesn’t mean that complications don’t occur here in Canada, in Montreal,” said Sinno. “What it does mean is that their patients don’t have adequate follow-up, and the type of complications that they’re getting is not the things that we do see here in Canada.”

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Denis-Bérubé said her decision to try to save money ended up costing her more, both in physical and psychological suffering.

“I deal with it,” she said. “I just really want to tell my story to avoid some woman to have the same pain.”

Since her trip to Colombia, she has had to undergo two more surgeries and still has at least one more to come.

She estimates that the total cost has risen to more than $40,000.

“It’s probably the big the biggest mistake I’ve done in my life really,” she said.