A woman in Phoenix trusted that she found a reputable plastic surgery clinic in Mexico, but soon learned that she was part of a group of people coming down with a deadly infection. She started seeing patients pass away one by one and hoped she wasn't next.
The CDC says there are almost another dozen confirmed ongoing cases.
Months later, Alondra was diagnosed with fungal meningitis. It's a rare infection in the brain and spinal cord that's extremely difficult to cure. "So when I saw that hey, this girl was sick, let me reach out to her and ask her, like, what symptoms, you know. And so, you know, when the doctor told me it's meningitis, I reached out back to her and I told her, well, I might have what you have," she said.
Alondra says she reached out to her surgeon in Mexico and was kicked out of his Facebook group for patients. "It would be the most serious, I would say, of anything I've seen," said Dr. Tatyana Shekhel, infectious disease specialist at St Joseph's Hospital. This isn't the first time a U.S. citizen has traveled abroad for a cosmetic medical procedure, nor is it the first time they've come back with an infectious disease.