**Part 1**

You know we hustling every day. We hustling.

That’s just the rhythm. The heartbeat of anybody trying to build something from nothing. And back then? I was *hungry*.

This was early, early in my entrepreneurial business journey. Everybody knows that phase, right? The phase where you want *all* the clients. It don’t matter who come see you. You want them. Give me here. I need the money. I need the money. I need the money. I need to grow it.

For sure.

So this was a weekend. Let’s say it was a Friday. I was actually at home doing some back office work—paperwork, invoices, the boring stuff that keeps the lights on. And then my phone buzzes.

A text message from someone I don’t know saying they want to book a service.

I’m like, “Yippee, come on. Let’s go.”

Because that’s how hungry I was. A stranger texts me out of nowhere? Perfect. Sign me up. I didn’t even stop to think about red flags. I just saw dollar signs and a new client to add to my growing roster.

So I say, “Well, tell me a little bit about what’s going on. What surgery did you have?”

Y’all know I always start off with that. You have to. Different surgeries mean different protocols. Different risks. Different everything.

She tells me she just had lipo and a BBL and arm lipo. And she is ready to start her massages.

I’m like, “Okay, cool.”

Standard stuff. Post-op lymphatic massages. I’d done a hundred of them. So I’m doing what I do—texting the regular info, trying to set up a date, trying to set up a time. I’m actually trying to see her *today* because I’m trying to grow my business. Same-day service? That’s how you build a reputation.

While I’m in the midst of texting her, my phone buzzes again.

She’s in a hospital right now. I hope that’s not a problem.

Huh?

Excuse me?

I stare at the screen. Read it twice. Three times.

So when she said she—wait.

The patient or the client is not even texting me. It’s somebody else. A family member. A friend. Someone typing from her phone.

I’m like, okay. Weird, but okay. People have complications. It happens.

And then before I could even ask my next question—I was about to ask what she’s in the hospital for—the response comes again. Messages come through fast, like whoever’s typing is nervous.

Complications unrelated to surgery.

*Unrelated to surgery.*

First of all, you can’t tell me that.

I don’t think she realized I was a nurse. Not *a* nurse. An ER nurse.

Here’s the thing about the ER: you learn to smell bullshit from three rooms away. You learn that when somebody says “unrelated,” they usually mean “embarrassing.” And when somebody lands in the hospital right after cosmetic surgery? It’s *always* related. Always. The anesthesia. The fluid shifts. The electrolyte imbalances. The infections. The clots.

But I go for it. Because I got time. And because that hungry phase makes you stupid.

“Okay, so tell me what’s going on.”

She goes, “Well, her potassium is really high.”

I said, “Her potassium is really high? Well, what is her potassium level?”

She tells me it’s an eight.

What does that mean, nurses? What does that mean?

Let me break it down for you. When it comes to critical care and prioritizing who’s serious and who’s not—if somebody’s potassium is greater than a six? They’re not going to a regular medical floor. They’re going to the ICU. That’s not a suggestion. That’s a fact.

Potassium is the silent killer. It doesn’t scream. It whispers. And then your heart just… stops.

So now I’m thinking: how in the world is your potassium an eight and you’re telling me it’s “complications unrelated to surgery” and trying to make it seem like it’s not serious?

I said bump the text. I’m calling this girl. Or whoever I’m talking to.

The phone rings twice. A woman picks up. Voice is shaky.

“Hey,” I say. “First off, who am I talking to?”

She goes, “Well, I’m her cousin. But I’m here with her.”

“Okay, cool. So tell me what’s going on. For real.”

She’s like, “Well, she had high potassium and elevated sodium.”

I cut her off. “Yeah, so she’s in the ICU.”

She was quiet for a second. Then: “Yeah. She is.”

And then she dropped the line that almost made me laugh. “But I talked to the charge nurse on the floor, and she said it was okay for you to come up here and do her massages.”

No, ma’am. No, ma’am.

I’m hungry, but I ain’t starving.

I’m not about to risk my life, my license, and my livelihood to come and touch her up there. In a hospital. Where she’s in the ICU. With a potassium level that could kill her at any second.

I had to explain it slow, like she was a child: “Hey, just because I’m a nurse doesn’t mean I can just bop up into anybody’s facility and start doing services. There has to be an arrangement. A contractual agreement. Liability. Insurance. Permissions.”

I said, “If she’s in the hospital and it’s fairly quickly after surgery, that means she probably needs to stay there. It’s in her best interest. I’m always medical first. We’ll deal with the massages later. That’s not as important as your lab work being out of whack or you having a major complication.”

She thanked me. Said she understood.

I hung up the phone and just stared at the wall.

*She’s in the ICU. Something is wrong. Something serious is wrong.*

I was apprehensive. But also curious. Because if you just had cosmetic surgery and now you’re in the hospital? I would think it’s related to that too.

The next day came faster than I expected.

**Part 2**

Not even twenty-four hours later.

Early morning. Sun barely up. My phone buzzes again. Same cousin.

She’s been discharged. Can you come see her today?

I’m thinking in my mind: *you were just in the ICU yesterday. Your potassium was eight. I know you’re not ready to be discharged.*

This is weird. And what a coincidence that I said the only way I can see you and start your massages is if you’re medically cleared and discharged. And then—*poof*—the very next day, she’s out.

Against my better judgment—and I want to be clear about this, because judgment is supposed to be the thing that keeps you alive—I said, “All right. I’ll come see her.”

Y’all will not believe what I walked into.

Let me back up for a second.

Potassium is a very important electrolyte in your body because it works on the contractility of the heart. Your heart is a muscle. It needs the right balance of electrolytes to squeeze and relax in rhythm. Too little potassium? Arrhythmia. Too much? The heart cramps up and stops.

Fun fact: when somebody’s on death row and they’re getting a lethal injection? It’s a very, very high dose of potassium. That’s what stops the heart. That’s what ends it.

So when somebody tells me their potassium hit eight? They didn’t just have a “complication.” They had a near-death experience.

But I didn’t know the full story yet. Not even close.

I drove to her place. Some apartment complex on the outskirts of town. Nothing fancy. The kind of place where you can hear your neighbor’s TV through the walls.

I knocked. The cousin opened the door. She looked tired. Worn out. The kind of tired that comes from sleeping in a hospital chair for three nights.

“She’s in the back,” the cousin said.

I walked in.

And she did not look good.

I don’t mean that in a shallow, “her body’s messed up from surgery” way. I mean she physically did not look well. Her skin had that grayish tint. The kind you see right before somebody codes. Her lips were pale. Her eyes had that glazed-over look.

I’m trying to be nice. Get a better understanding. I definitely want to help her. And again—I’m new at this. Still in that phase where every client feels like a make-or-break moment. And I’m an ER nurse. So in the back of my mind, I’m like, *okay, there’s nothing I can’t handle.*

I have her fill out the consent forms. Standard stuff. Name, date of birth, surgical history, medications, allergies.

“So,” I say, pen in hand, “tell me about what led you to be in the hospital. What happened?”

She looks at me. Blinks slow. Like she’s processing through molasses.

“Well, I had surgery. Lipo and BBL. And I got my teeth done in Tijuana.”

Red flag number one.

Why the hell y’all going out of the country to get this stuff done? You know you shouldn’t be getting it done. Your ass is going to another country to get cut open. You don’t worry about the side effects? You don’t worry about what that stuff is going to do to your body long-term?

This is going to be a generation of people in their sixties and seventies with foreign objects and migrated filler and botched surgeries, and nobody’s prepared for what that’s going to look like.

She kept talking.

“On the way back, I missed my dialysis.”

I stopped writing.

“You missed your *dialysis*?”

“Yeah. The flight was long. And they don’t do medical clearance the same way over there like they do in the United States.”

Y’all do know what medical clearance is for, right? In the US, you get lab work. An EKG. A urinalysis. All of it for a reason—to make sure you’re physically fit and healthy enough to have an elective cosmetic procedure.

A lot of people go out of the country specifically *because* they don’t do all that. Because they’d never pass the pre-op testing here.

“How did you even get cleared?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They don’t do all that over there.”

Y’all be really risking your life for a BBL. That stuff is crazy.

So she continues to get undressed. I’m setting up my table. My oils. My gloves. The usual routine.

And every little movement? She winces. Grimaces. Breathes sharp through her teeth. More pain than what I’d expect from somebody recovering from surgery. I mean, yeah, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable. But she looked like she was about to pass out just from lifting her arm.

“The surgery’s really hurting you pretty bad, huh?” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Then she paused. Kind of thinks. Looks at the ceiling like she’s deciding whether to tell me something.

“Well,” she says, “they had to do CPR on me.”

I put the oil bottle down.

“What do you mean they had to do CPR on you?”

She says, “Um, my heart stopped when they tried to do my dialysis when I got back.”

Your heart *stopped*.

The woman died. Flatlined. Coded.

“It stopped twice,” she said.

I said, “So you went into cardiac arrest twice?”

“Yeah. I did.” She said it so casual. Like she was telling me she missed a flight. “But they got me back. And then eventually I was able to finish my dialysis.”

Her whole chest was black and blue. From the sternum to her collarbones. Bruised deep purple and greenish-yellow. And it looked *caved in*. Like somebody had been pushing so hard that the ribs bent inward.

Because that’s what CPR does. It saves your life by breaking your body.

I could tell that had been done. Recent. Within the last few days.

Now I’m thinking in my head: *what else is wrong with you?*

The woman wanted the BBL that bad. She wanted the body so badly that she went to another country, skipped dialysis, threw her electrolytes completely out of whack, died twice, got her chest caved in by CPR, and the first thing she does after being discharged is call a massage therapist.

I can’t feel sorry for somebody who passes away because they went across the border for a bigger ass and a slimmer waist. I’m not going to lie to you.

And she probably wasn’t a bad-looking girl before this. Probably was perfectly fine. But Instagram got in her head. The algorithms. The comparisons. The feeling of never being enough.

Couple of ribs are broken from the CPR. She’s probably having trouble breathing. And here she is, wanting a *lymphatic massage*.

Then the other thing clicked in my head.

“Do you pee?”

She looked confused. “What?”

“Do you still pee? Urinate. Pass urine.”

She goes, “No.”

Wait, wait, wait.

“No?”

“No. Not really. Not since the hospital.”

Where’s the fluid going?

Let me explain something. The purpose of a post-op lymphatic massage is to move fluid back into your lymphatic system so you can urinate it out. That’s how your body gets rid of the swelling. You massage the fluid toward your core, your kidneys filter it, and you pee it out.

If you don’t have that output? If your kidneys aren’t working? If you’re not peeing?

Then the fluid has nowhere to go.

I can massage it all the way up to your heart, and it gets stuck. And then your heart stops *again*.

I’m standing in this lady’s bedroom, gloves in my hand, looking at her black-and-blue chest and her swollen body and her drains—and y’all, when I say it was *pure blood* coming out of her drains? Not pinkish fluid. Not serosanguineous. Straight red. Fresh. Like somebody had opened a tap.

I could not believe I was up in this lady’s house.

I looked at her. Then at the drains. Then back at her.

She’s going to die right here today.

**Part 3**

That thought hit me like cold water.

*She’s going to die right here today. In front of me. On my watch.*

And what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

I’m an ER nurse. I’ve seen people code. I’ve done CPR on strangers in fluorescent lighting with a team of ten people around me and a crash cart and paddles and drugs. I know how to bring somebody back.

But here? In this apartment? With no equipment? No epinephrine? No defibrillator? Just me and a massage table and a woman who’s already died twice?

No, ma’am.

I looked at her. Took a breath.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not going to massage you. Not today. Not like this.”

Her face crumpled. Not in pain. In disappointment.

“But I need the massages,” she said. “The doctor said—”

“I don’t care what the doctor said. I’m going to do a nurse assessment. Try to get you a little more comfortable. But I am *not* moving fluid through your body when you’re not peeing. Do you understand what happens if I do that?”

She shook her head.

“Your heart stops. A third time. And maybe this time, they don’t get you back.”

She was swollen from head to toe. I’m not exaggerating. Her fingers looked like sausages. Her ankles were gone—just puffy columns from calf to foot. Her face was round and tight, like somebody had pumped air into her cheeks.

Everything was swollen. Everything.

I told her, “You’re going to have to let your doctors know the truth. Because I know you didn’t tell them you went out of the country. I know you didn’t tell them about the surgery and the missed dialysis and the CPR. You have to tell them everything. You need fluid taken off of you. And the only way that’s going to happen is with dialysis.”

She started crying. Not loud. Just tears sliding down her swollen cheeks.

“What I could do won’t help you,” I said. “I could make the situation *worse*. I need you to love yourself enough to know that this isn’t—”

“I’ll pay you,” she said. “I’ll pay you double.”

“Ma’am—”

“Triple. I have the money. Just do the massage. Please. I need to take my Instagram pictures. I need to get back to my life.”

She was throwing numbers at me. Beds of cash. Racks.

“Massage me. Please. I need these basketball players in my DMs. The football players. The rappers. I need to post. I need to—”

“No, ma’am.”

“That’s not worth my license. It’s not worth your life. And it’s not worth me getting you right just so you can look good in a casket.”

I packed my stuff. Slow. Deliberate. Making sure she saw that I wasn’t panicking, but I wasn’t staying either.

“Do you understand what you’re asking me to do?” I said. “You want me to touch a body that’s already failed twice. You want me to move fluid into a system that can’t process it. That’s not a massage. That’s manslaughter.”

She just stared at me.

I gave her the only thing I could: a phone number. Her nephrologist. The one she’d been avoiding.

“Call him. Tell him the truth. All of it. The surgery, the country, the missed dialysis, the cardiac arrests. Everything.”

Then I walked out.

I sat in my car for ten minutes before I started the engine. Hands on the wheel. Staring at the apartment building.

*All money ain’t good money.*

I’d heard that phrase a hundred times. Never really felt it until that moment.

She reached out to her nephrologist. They were able to pull—get this—*twenty pounds of fluid* off her. Twenty. Pounds. That’s almost three gallons. That’s how much swelling she was carrying. That’s how close she was to drowning in her own fluids.

Jesus Christ.

A couple weeks later, she texted me. Said she was feeling better. Asked if we could “get back started again.”

I told her no.

I told her I would *never* work with her again. Because she really had me messed up. She really played with her life. And I should have never been over there in the first place.

Lesson learned: It don’t matter how fast you want to grow. You still need to use your brain. You still need to keep the foundation integrity of your business. And some people? You can’t save them from themselves.

But here’s where the story gets worse.

**Part 4**

The surgery world is very small.

Especially for providers in the same area. We all know each other. We all talk. We share warnings about dangerous clients, bad outcomes, risky situations.

Time passed. Months. I built my business the right way. Screened my clients. Said no when I needed to say no. Slept better at night.

Then one day, I got a call from another nurse—someone I’d trained with years ago.

“Hey,” she said. “You worked with that woman, right? The one who coded after the Tijuana surgery?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“She came to me. Wanted massages. Told me you left her *destitute*. Said you abandoned her without any way to be taken care of.”

I almost dropped the phone.

“She said *what*?”

“Said you didn’t care about her at all. Said you left her high and dry. No warning. No follow-up. Just ghosted.”

I was quiet for a long time.

Because here’s the thing about people like that: they rewrite history. They tell the story that makes *them* the victim. They leave out all the parts where they lied. Where they withheld information. Where they almost got somebody else in trouble.

She left out the part where she had a potassium level of eight.

She left out the part where she died twice and needed CPR.

She left out the part where she wasn’t peeing and wanted me to massage her anyway.

She left out the part where I told her—begged her—to go back to the hospital.

In her version of the story, I was the villain. The greedy nurse who took her money and ran.

But I never took a dime from her.

Not one dollar.

Because I walked out before I ever touched her.

And the other nurse? She believed the story. For about five minutes. Until she asked one question: “Did he actually do the massage?”

“No,” the woman said. “He refused.”

“So what exactly did you pay him for?”

Silence.

The other nurse hung up and called me back laughing. But I wasn’t laughing. Because that woman is still out there. Still chasing the next surgery. Still risking her life for Instagram validation. Still rewriting history to make herself the hero of a story where she flatlined on a dialysis table.

That’s the part that haunts me.

Not the near-death experience. Not the twenty pounds of fluid. Not even the lie she told about me.

What haunts me is that she never learned anything. She didn’t look at her black-and-blue chest and think, *maybe this isn’t worth it*. She looked at it and thought, *I just need better massages.*

And there are thousands of women just like her. Maybe tens of thousands. Flying to Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic. Getting cut open by people they found on Instagram. Coming back with complications they hide from their American doctors. Dying in airport bathrooms and hotel rooms and their own apartments.

The news doesn’t report most of them. Because it’s not a crime. It’s not a scandal. It’s just another woman who wanted to be beautiful and paid for it with everything she had.

**Part 5**

Man, listen. Ladies, y’all got to cut this stuff out.

You look beautiful just the way you are. I’m serious. The cellulite? That’s normal. The saggy parts? That’s normal. The stretch marks? Normal. Normal. Normal.

Sometimes makeup makes you look a little better. I’ll give you that. But sometimes it makes you look like a clown. I ain’t going to lie. Some of y’all do not have the facial structure for that heavy contour. That’s just facts.

But the surgery? The veneers that make your teeth look like piano keys? The BBLs that make your proportions look like a cartoon? The lip fillers that make your mouth look like a allergic reaction?

Stop.

At least don’t go to Mexico and Puerto Rico and Colombia to risk your life just for a body shape that doesn’t even look good. Half the time, it’s obvious you had work done. And not in a “wow, she looks amazing” way. In a “what happened to her” way.

If your teeth were messed up? Okay, fine. Fix your teeth. I’ll give you that one. Good dental work can change your life. But don’t get the giant veneers that make you look like a horse. Moderation. Balance. The things we used to have before social media scrambled our brains.

Here’s my real thing, though. And I need y’all to hear me.

If you know you have to go out of the country to get cut open because you can’t pass the medical clearance here? If you’re skipping dialysis to fly home from a surgery you didn’t need in the first place? If you’re dying twice and your first thought is “I need to post”?

That’s not wanting to be beautiful. That’s a mental illness.

I’m sorry. It is.

It shows you don’t love yourself. Not really. Because if you loved yourself, you wouldn’t risk your life for a version of you that only exists in a filtered photo.

Give me the cellulite. Give me the saggy titties. Give me the real body that breathes and bleeds and ages. I’ll take all that before I take a BBL. Me personally.

But y’all let me know what you think.

Because at the end of the day, that woman is still out there. Still carrying twenty pounds of fluid that almost killed her. Still chasing the next procedure. Still telling stories where she’s the victim.

And me? I’m just a nurse who learned that sometimes the most important thing you can do is walk away.

All money ain’t good money.

And not every client is worth your license.

Peace.