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Never let your loved one go to EOS. I accompanied a friend of mine to go have a gastric sleeve done in Tijuana by Dr. Ortiz. I was a little Larry from the start as all of the Facebook comments are 100% positive… You can tell there is zero room for any negative comments and yet when people are looking for information about this company, you’re basically Being spoonfed only positive comments with no reality as to what that big picture may look like. The cost was good. It makes it affordable for many people who can’t afford to have gastric sleeve or bypass done here in the United States. The process in and of itself would never meet US standards for cleanliness, communication, education of the staff who treat you and the facilities where you stay. They tell that they put you up at a nice hotel the night before your surgery and then you were in the hospital for two nights and then you’re back at the hotel for two nights after.

The reality is, EOS owns two floors of a resort type hotel that look very very different than any of the other part of the hotel. Even the hotel staff does not help you well if they know you are a patient or with someone on one of the floors recovering from a procedure by Dr. Ortiz. The hotel rooms are the most generic step down rooms with just two beds, a chair, and a TV. The bathroom is set for handicap people. You can only call the desk and get the same two or three items for room service, post operative, leave meaning green Popsicles, Jell-O, and a type of chicken broth. They have no variations. The staff for EOS keep you on a tight leash. As I have seen and other reviews on the day that you are to be discharged, you have to be out of your room by 7 AM even if you have a later flight. Most of the people who had the bypass surgery or not exactly up to feeling like touring around Mexico or going on a Shopping trip two days after the bypass.

My friend was pretty sick and I did not feel that I could leave her in a room and take the tour myself… Nor is it an especially safe area. The pick up time was a little bit late and they do multiple pick ups… You will be squeezed into a minivan , with a bunch of other people picked up at the airport and taken to the hotel. The instructions are super vague and minimal and then you were up early the next morning, very, very early to head over to the “Hospital “which was actually an older hotel that was still under renovation. I would not recommend walking off the hospital grounds because it is in a way sketchy neighborhood and is fenced in. There is some food available for the person that helps a patient, or the caregiver that came with them but it has very short hours during the day, so you have to catch that small little snack shack during operating hours. They only clean that hospital with Fabuloso, which is not a strong enough FDA approved, anti stringent to kill bacteria.

They pair you up in rooms with people that you don’t even know, and if you are the companion, they give you basically a very old, uncomfortable cushion chair that has a slight leg rest. I am only 5’6” my feet hang off the end by about a foot and a half. The patients are in an old, old Hilrom hospital beds. They do not plugged into. The wall to get the call light and there is no call Light or emergency light for the nursing staff to know if you even have a problem. You are paired up in a devil room with people you don’t even know and have to use the same bathroom with these people. The IVs are in very old-school IVs, there are in old plastic bottles. I am a registered nurse and have extensive training and IVs and I have not even seen this type of IV infusion system since 1990… Early 1990.

I had to go out to get the “nurse quote to give my friend her pain medication as they don’t round through very often. I was shocked when they brought her back after the surgery sitting upright in a wheelchair and she look like she had been drug through and not home. they don’t bring them up in a gurney and transfer them to the bed. They basically stand them and kind of flop them into the bed. The doctor did come for about a five minute introduction right before they were to take her down for surgery. He spoke very quickly and just kept saying they will give you pain medication and something for nausea and you will pay for extra. I asked several times at what point do you pay for the extra medication and he just said they will take care of it. Also, when my friend came out of surgery, they had done a hiatal hernia repair and within eight hours a billing person was up at my friend’s bedside asking for the extra $350 for that repair in cash. She did tell me that they said you might be charged that if they did the procedure but I thought if a doctor did an additional procedure they had to come until at least the caregiver they were going to do it and there was zero communication. We only heard about it from the billing person, so who knows if it really got done. She said when she was down there, it was very traumatic for her because they wheeled her in and somebody else was on the table, crying and stressed out. Then somebody else was being wheeled out. I agree with comments above that there was no way they could have sterilized the equipment in that table appropriately to not have a crossover of infections. When I started walking around the “Hospital “area it was weird because there was only one nurse in the entire hospital who could start IVs… And I don’t even know if he was a nurse. When my friends IV infiltrated during the night, she did not get any medication for about four hours, immediately following her surgery and had no IV hydration either. I tried to ask somebody if I could even start a new IV or if they could get someone in they just said it would have to wait. So for about four hours my friend just suffered with no pain medication., and no IV. There is no urgency in anything other to get you out of that room by 7 AM. They wake you up at 5 AM the second morning you were there and you were to pack up and be heard it down to a big area where everybody else is in the waiting room. They start telling people to come to a window and they are to pay for all of their additional medication‘s that were used that you never even know what your cost was going to be. Then they load you on a bus and take you to the “Hotel “where are you go sit in another room for another couple of hours why a gentleman, who clearly has no medical experience, starts to tell you about what you need to eat, and do add more so that , the patient and any caregiver with them can order any pharmacy things you want from Mexico and they will write you a prescription for it and get it for you. I was looking through the book and it was insane. The amount of medication they would write prescriptions for you to take out of the country, like Xanax, clonazepam, pain, medication, all sorts of medication’s that were being illegally and substandardly administered, and they were just charging a high fee for it. It was like another end of their business to make more money on prescription drugs, and then sent us all to America to facilitate drug addictions. I literally couldn’t believe it. They also had some very pricey, protein, drink, and vitamins that they were selling at what would cost more than top and Protein brands here in the US. Prepare yourself to get a nickel and dime to death at this point. Then they send you to your room, tell you to call for room service and eat the Popsicles and terrible broth, and then want you to go on a tour and buy things from their vendors, the very next day. We flew home one day early because of a scheduling issue at home. As noted above, we had to be at the front desk area by 7 AM.

They make you wait in this big holding room for a couple of hours before they even take you to the airport, and yes, crossing the border did seem very sketchy. I have come back-and-forth across Tijuana border multiple times, and the driver did seem uneasy. Our driver had all these one line limericks and quick little things that he would drop along the way trying to be funny when most of the people in the car were just a little bit sick… and wanted to just to get to the airport in peace. When I started looking at all of the information that was available online of Dr. Ortiz company, I found that he had a prior company several years ago that was closed down, and they had multiple deaths out of the California area for people that had procedures in his facilities and then went home. He literally does do 20 procedures a day starting not until after noon. My friend was scheduled to be done around three or 4 PM and they didn’t even come and take her until 11 PM for her procedure. They brought her back about 1 AM… And she looked awful. I was genuinely scared for her. I tried asking anyone about the facility, or the hospital there, but was given very abrasive answers, and I had read online that if you question About what’s going on there in the facility, they can throw you out. There were several sites I found where people had said the caregiver had asked for pain medication or help for their loved one, or one of the doctor to come see there. There were issues after the procedure, and the patient and caregiver were taken to the front door, walked out past the gate of the “hospital” and then were told they had to get themselves gone and they could not come back. I had lost a coat, I left it in the bedside cabinet, because there was zero room for me and two patients in that room. We had gotten back to the hotel for recovery and I tried calling the EOS number to see if I could take an Uber or the hotel shuttle over to get my coat and was told I could not. The Hotel Bellman tried to help me and told me that he was told that was not his job. I went to the nurse that was up on the floor where the EOS residence recover and she just brushed me off and said she would check into it. I must’ve made three different phone calls to different places trying to get my coat as we were down there in January and no one would tell me that I could just go back to the hotel and get it. I was told that I could not go over there for anything, and the gate would not be opened if the friend I was with was not currently there.

It is very sketchy how they keep things so locked up. Again, it is just an old hotel they are trying to refurbish and utilize as a hospital. From what I understand there are two facilities where this group practices out of and there is a nicer one and an old crummy one and apparently we got stuck in the old crummy one. It literally is not a hospital but a hotel that they are working on the entire time you’re there, so there is loud construction, banging and building, and it makes it very hard to sleep. They had no central AC, but had us open our windows. The caregiver only gets one small lap flannel, throw blanket so if you tend to be cold, be sure to bring an extra blanket if you were the caregiver. They will not give you anything else. I was constantly wiping down the bathroom after my friends roommate would use it because we did not know what her background was. I was helping her a lot all night long along with my friend as both of them were very belchy, urpy, and had quite a bit of nausea the first night I needed a lot of help getting up to the restroom, etc. I honestly don’t know how someone would ever go there on their own to do this procedure because those nurses do not come in and help you one bit. I know they are not formally train nurses. There might be one nurse on the floor who has some training but otherwise they are just trained on the job. Most of them do not speak English hardly at all so you may want to take your phone with a Spanish translator on it when we got back to San Diego to catch our flight home, I told my friend that I forbid her to come and have any other procedures there… No matter how much it looks glamorous on Facebook and 100% in the comments are only positive… There is a whole other side and dangerous perspective of going to Doctor Ortiz with the EOS bariatric center. I did some extensive reading and there are a number of other bariatric specialist there who actually work out of hospitals that are decent as well as have a better bedside manner.

I would do a lot of research on all ends of Dr. Ortiz and the EOS center before you sign. This is coming from a nurse and a friend who cared very much about another friend who went this route. She did not have any medical complications after and has had success with her gastric sleeve… But I will say there had to be a better and more safe way. Even the weight loss does not outweigh the risk that we put ourselves under and the way that that staff literally treats you. I had read over and over that the Facebook staff and the nurse in the US is extremely pushy and rude, and will just block you and keep your money. It is not a place that you can count on getting reimbursement back and if there are any medical or legal issues, you are about SOL with all of the amazing doctors in numerous countries that are out there, this doctor has taken advantage of a procedure and turned it into a chopping meal with no safety attached to it. I think that more people should do a deeper research into the company that Dr. Ortiz had before he started this company because he had to change his company name because there were so many issues with his prior company. Please, please be smart and do your due diligence. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is. This was a very stressful trip that I accompanied my friend with, and I still have some nightmares about how things went down and the unsafe environment that we placed ourselves in. We are smarter than that, and no amount of saving a couple of thousand dollars is worth putting your life at risk and potentially never returning back to your family.