She went for a cheap nose job in Mexico — now doctors say she might never wake up

Doctors in El Paso have told Laura Avila’s family that they have two choices.

Either take her off the breathing machines and let her go, or pursue more surgeries, so she will hopefully be able to “regain minimal functioning skills,” according to a GoFundMe campaign in her name.

But she’s not battling cancer, or some rare disease that’s baffling medical staff.

Avila is a Texan, from El Paso but now living in Dallas, who crossed the border for cheap plastic surgery on Oct. 30. She went to a “Rinocenter” surgery center in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, for work on her nose, according to KFOX.

“The price, of course, compared to those in U.S. was less than a third,” Angie Avila, Laura’s sister, told WFAA.

But for eight hours after she had gone under for the procedure, doctors told her fiancé that her blood pressure had dropped after anesthesia and they were not able to perform the nose job, according to WFAA. Instead of trickling down her spine and spreading through her body, the anesthesia medicine affected Laura’s brain instead, the station reported.

She had suffered four minutes of cardiac arrest, but it took eight hours to get her transferred to a hospital in Juarez, KFOX reported.

Those eight hours, though, have turned into an eternity for Laura’s family. She spent six days in a Juarez hospital Intensive Care Unit, experiencing seizures due to brain damage, family wrote in the GoFundMe campaign.

Only after they paid the hospital bill in full in Mexico did Laura’s doctors grant her transfer to a hospital in El Paso, her family says. They have hired lawyers in Juarez to get Laura’s full medical records, according to the GoFundMe.

That fundraiser had brought in nearly $68,000 of its $150,000 goal as of Tuesday morning, as her family now tries to get her moved to a Dallas hospital for a second opinion on the two medical options doctors in El Paso are giving Laura.

“As a family, we decided it is too soon to make such an impossible decision,” Angie Avila wrote. “We have been working relentlessly to transfer her to a hospital in Dallas to get a second opinion.”

“We are currently working on transferring her to Parkland in Dallas or Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Since today is the 13th day Laura has been intubated—and doctors don’t recommend leaving her this way for more than two weeks — time is of the essence.”

This story was originally published November 13, 2018 at 6:10 AM with the headline "She went for a cheap nose job in Mexico — now doctors say she might never wake up."