"My fiance and I went to Dr Alvarez for our VSG surgery and are very pleased with our decision. I first contacted his office via email. Susan was very prompt in responding to the email & provided answers to all of our questions. Susan was great walking us through each step required to get us to surgery date.
We flew to San Antonio a day before required & relaxed at La Quinta Inn (the post-op hotel). Our room was very nice & comfortable. The next day Rosy picked us & took us to Eagle Pass. Rosy was very friendly & professional. For those of you who are back seat drivers, sit back & relax; she's an excellent driver & drives the speed limit. She got us over the border both times without any hassles.
On Monday morning when Rosy took us to the hospital, we were greeted at the door by Dr. Alvarez. He made us feel comfortable with his kind & sincere approach. We went into his office and reviewed our health histories with him. His associate Dr Garza weighed us and took our pre-op picture. Dr. Garza then took us to our hospital room to drop off our bags and then to get our chest X-ray & pre-op blood work. After that we went back to our rooms to change into the hospital gowns and off to surgery we went.
Dr. Alvarez is very skilled and I would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone wanting to have VSG. I'm an operating room nurse, my insurance pays for this surgery, but I still chose to go to Mexico to have Dr Alvarez perform our surgeries. I'm impressed with his low complication rates and the number of bariatric surgeries he's performed. I know if we had our surgeries at that hospital I work at, we would have been on the OR table a minimum of two hours. My surgery took 25 minutes and my fiance's was around 35 minutes. Our incisions look like a plastic surgeon closed them. We have had no complications & our recovery has been very routine.
We are also impressed by the number of times Dr Alvarez and his associate physicians checked in on us. That doesn't happen in the U.S. The evening before we got discharged we were shown aftercare videos and were able to ask any questions we had. We got folders with all our surgery information in it, Rx pain meds and an acid reduction med. We got a copy of Dr. Alvarez's book.
Dr Alvarez emails us prior to the start of each diet phase change. We are able to contact him with any questions we have.
The hospital is not new & modern so if that's what is important to you, you'll be disappointed. However, it's clean, quiet, & staffed with nurses who are there for your needs and not to do required paperwork. If we needed pain medication, they came right back with it. We never had to wait.
I found it funny that as patients we didn't have any patient ID bands or anything that designated us as patients (except our hospital gowns and our slow walking in the halls). Most of the nurses don't speak English, but it really was not much of an issue. It gave us a chance to brush up on our rusty Spanish.
Dr. Alvarez has a young lady named Andrea on his staff. She came to check on us a couple of times. She speaks fluent English and is very sweet. She offered to go out to get my mom something for dinner.
Dr. Alvarez really has a great group of people on staff. It was a pleasure meeting all of them. We actually plan on going down just to visit at some point.
Good luck to everyone getting or considering surgery. You can't go wrong with choosing Dr. Alvarez as your VSG surgeon. He's fantastic.
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