Dear Patients,

Recently a patient I spent months counseling and assisting with her plastic surgery plans with Dr. Lev in Costa Rica had an unfortunate experience that has become the inspiration for this new page entitled "Beware of Well Meaning Guests".

I will begin by saying that this patient came to me in the first place after doing a great deal of research on the internet and discovering that Dr. Lev was the only plastic surgeon in Costa Rica who had a pristine reputation. She couldn't find one bad word about him anywhere in any chat room or any plastic surgery website anywhere on the internet. She was impressed with his reputation and then with his surgical skills when she met with me in person where I live in Los Angeles to see for herself firsthand the results of his work. I had my second face lift with Dr. Lev in 2007 and the patient and I met in 2012, so she was able to see how well his work was holding up after five years.

This woman was impressed with what she saw and booked a date with Dr. Lev for a thighplasty and then a face lift to be done a week after the thighplasty. Dr. Lev always puts six or seven days between major surgeries. She also informed me that she was bringing her sister along to help take care of her when she was recovering at the recovery facility.>/p>

I tried to talk her out of taking her sister with her because from years of working with plastic surgery patients I knew that as lovely as it sounds to have a loved one with you in Costa Rica, it is usually a bad idea in the end. Loved ones, no matter how loving and nurturing get extremely bored extremely fast when at the recovery facility where there is basically nothing to do but...well....recover! It's like traveling to a foreign country to spend a couple of weeks watching someone rest, sleep, heal, shuffle in their slippers to meals with other recovering patients.

Usually the loved one needs to leave. To spring free of the day to day nothing-to do's and eventually the patient starts to feel badly for being responsible for their loved one's boredom, so they prematurely get themselves out of bed where they NEED to be and go with the loved one on a tour, shopping, etc. Inevitably, the patient ends up setting their healing process back to square one and as a matter of fact, doing too much too soon can actually be detrimental to the surgery itself. In some cases I've seen patients who set themselves back so far they had to be brought back into the operating room because they compromised the surgery by running around way too soon postop...........to be there for and with their well-meaning loved one.

Let me get back to the story.
This patient and her sister (who DID become quite bored quite quickly) were sitting at the dinner table at the recovery retreat and began chatting with other patients of other plastic surgeons who were also at the same recovery facility.

Before too long, the sister of our patient learned that a couple of other patients recovering there had gone to a doctor that charged "half" of what Dr. Lev charges. The cheaper doctor's patient told the sister that it was "crazy" to spend so much money with Dr. Lev when you could go to their doctor for half the price!

The well-meaning guest of the cheaper doctor and the well-meaning sister of our patient shared this good news with our patient who came to have surgery, of course, with Dr. Lev in the first place.

Needless to say, our patient was quite intrigued with this good news of the cheaper doctor and made an appointment for a consultation with him and lo and behold was able to schedule her surgery with this doctor and in the process had enough money left over to treat her sister to a surgery as well!