Moving to Mexico nearly KILLED him

so I'm here at Plaza centenario which is just outside La Paz Mexico and I'm here to meet up with Terry when I first met Terry he told me a story that I think is really important to pass on and the gist of it is the medication he was taking up in the U.S to make him feel good was doing the exact opposite once he moved to Mexico and actually I've heard other people have a similar experience and once you hear about it it's gonna totally make sense but let's go ahead and meet Terry actually first let's talk about Plaza centenario because I knew coffee shop of choice Toscana it I live really really close to here so Toscana is a great coffee shop they allow dogs inside and my new favorite pizza place which is Bella ciao it opened yesterday we were the first people in line and we love it but let's go inside Terry lives in the back there's apartments here so let's head on inside and there it is hi I'm Terry and I'm formerly from Nebraska I read retired at around 62 years old my father worked to 70 and then retired and died two years later so I didn't want that to be the case for me and so I retired started working a part-time job and I was just totally sick of the Nebraska climate I I wanted to go somewhere where it was warm in the winter and unfortunately on half of my teacher retirement and my Social Security I really couldn't afford to go anywhere it was warm so I was complaining to my son old man yelling at clouds and he said why don't you take a look at Baja he and my daughter-in-law come down to Baja to visit Vacation all the time and I said I'll do that and I started looking and found out right away the Cobble was not what I was interested in at all and I got to La Paz and thought man if that place is half as nice as it looks and so I called my son I said it looks really good he said good get a plane ticket we'll fly down we'll do some research and then you might hate it you never know so we did we flew down in November of 2020. and uh spent five days staying at airbnbs and looking at everything and that's when I found out about all centenario and uh I'm I'm a rural person I taught in small schools my whole life and I really like having a bigger City close by but the rural feel of el centenario really really drew me I said This is Where I Belong so that's how I got here so Terry actually uh caught me up at the coffee shop the other day and gave me a tour of the I guess the plaza centenario residential side and there's six units back here and it is so cute back here I love it I never knew this was back here so there's like four businesses out front and six Apartments out back but I'm gonna have Terry tell you a little bit about his apartment and a little bit about the place here and we will get to that medical detail soon enough it's a one-bedroom apartment it's uh got a living room kitchen area combined a bathroom with a shower and a nice big bedroom with lots of closets and everything thing and it's everything all included including internet except electricity and it's for under seven hundred dollars I've got a great landlord and it takes care of everything and as someone that owned a house for over 50 years it's just so nice to be out from under that I I really like renting at my stage of life you know my neighbor Julie is the one that took care of me when I started having my problems and she's been here over eight years and I've been here close to three and every all the others are varying lengths of time but so it's a close-knit community back here we do a lot of things together and we have a little social Gatherings uh like Fernando and Lupe had a had us all over for Rosco de la Reyes celebration and it's a great way to learn about Mexican culture so I just love the closeness of it so that neighbor Julie just walked by she's hiding over there doesn't want to be on camera but she's a very important part of the story that you're about to hear about uh you know how Terry yeah let him tell the story let's get into the story and like I said this is something you need to be watching out for I've been hypertensive my whole life even when I was in high school and I took athletic physicals my blood pressure was always higher than it should have been for my age and I didn't need medication or anything but of course as the years went by I was on uh blood pressure medication and my doses kept increasing because my blood pressure kept increasing and when I moved down here I kept taking the same medications and I've been here about nine months I believe and I started to feel like I've never felt before I was weak I was tired it was an effort to walk across the kitchen I had no energy which is unusual here because there's so much to do and I got to the point where my neighbor Julie came over one time and she said uh we need to get you to a doctor and I've got a lifelong aversion to go into doctors like most people but she took me in her car down to see Dr Marco here a local physician and the first thing he did was put a cuff on me and I told him laughingly I said it'll be high because it always is and it was 75 over 40. and he said this is not good so the first thing he did was told me to quit all the medications to see what happens and within a day I was feeling better but I in the in the meantime I purchased a cuff and it became apparent that I wasn't going to be able to go unmedicated and fortunately my landlord here is I know is Dr Cuevas in La Paz who's a a great cardiologist and I was able to get in to see him and he did the stress test and echocardiogram and EKGs and everything and and when he visited with me I said well what's wrong I said my arteries all clogged up he said no your arteries are fine I said what's the deal he said it's the medication you're taking way too much I said he said you don't need all of that now he said apparently the lifestyle in Mexico really agrees with you and uh and the the thing is I don't have any stress I love it down here I get up in the morning I can't wait to go do do things whether it's just sit at my patio and do my crossword puzzle every morning or go to the beach and so he started me on a whole new blood pressure medication regimen which is way way simpler than it was before and I check my blood pressure daily and it's like 120 over 80. it's never been that low but I think the combination of the lifestyle not going through the stress of winter I think is a whole lot of it and the fact that I I hated fish in Nebraska I literally would not eat it and I eat fish all the time uh the other day I told my son that I was going to cook some basa and he said where'd you get that I said well I have some in the freezer and he said you voluntarily bought fish and put it in freezer and I said yeah so the whole dot it's just a whole lifestyle uh it's hard to explain how much better I feel than I have for the past 15 years and I give all the credit to Mexico okay so there was the big reveal and I want you to keep watching this this video is totally not over yet but uh Terry was the first person I heard that had this but he was not the last and I guess this is kind of a thing down here is that when you get to Mexico and you just chill out and you start to just adopt a new way of life and a new way of eating and whatnot you know there might be things uh especially medically that were treated up in the US that need to be changed so definitely something to be watching for the the doctors here um Terry mentioned that he went to was it Marco I think Dr Marco that's the same doctor that I've been to before uh so it's just kind of like a little Pharmacy and he's next door and then but if you go into La Paz that's where the Specialists are and so there are a lot of Specialists and they're really really affordable like Dr Marco's a couple dollars to see him and 50 pesos yeah 50 it's 2.50 and but if you go downtown and you see a specialist it's still like you know with all the tests and things I had chest x-rays and an ultrasound and a check by a cancer surgeon and everything it was done within a couple of hours and it was a couple hundred dollars so even seeing Specialists down here it's it's fast you can usually see them within a couple days and it is really affordable for people from the United States it's just it's the numbers are different yes yeah after my visit with Dr Marco my landlord connected me with Dr cuevos he's a AMA certified cardiologist in La Paz and the first day I had an EKG and an echocardiogram and then the next day I went in and did the stress test on the on the treadmill with all the wires hooked up and between those two days he he had what was called in the United States a halder monitor and checked my blood pressure and stuff overnight and all of that stuff both days and everything was 10 000 pesos which is roughly five hundred dollars U.S and just to put that in perspective if you have an echocardiogram in the United States it costs between 250 and 300 just to have the results red basically uh when I lived in the United States after I retired I had a I worked a couple of days part-time just to help and I could barely make ends meet I could make my payments my utilities no money to go out and do anything and uh got to be pretty boring and I get down here and it's like all of a sudden I have a disposable income I can pay all my debts I can buy I don't shop store brands anymore I buy what I want to buy in the store and there's so many opportunities for entertainment here and I have the money to go do it I mean I'm not Wealthy by any means but basically my my income doubled when I crossed the border and that's that's a benefit that I had heard about but I didn't realize what an impact it would have on my life yeah the impact of how far the dollar stretches in Mexico is is just huge it's if you're collecting a retirement or whatnot or your your salary is in dollars and you're spending pesos for people from the United States Mexico is very affordable and you know going out to restaurants I'm finally convincing cat that we can go out to restaurants as often as we want because it's not too expensive and actually we've decided that we're going to go out to restaurants uh because we are we're part-timers go out in the United States much less often because I mean we get sticker shock and we're like you know what instead of going out once a week in Portland let's go out five times a week in Mexico and so the times that we're here we're kind of living a more lavish lifestyle I guess and coming back to the United States and maybe buttoning things down a little Jay just because the the cost of things is different but one thing a lot of people ask about is do the people I interview speak Spanish so let's ask Terry about that when I got here I spoke no Spanish I tried to do a little online lessons before I got here but there were so many other things going on I just wasn't wasn't tied to it and after I got here I I've done everything I can to assimilate as much as I can into the culture I I take online lessons every day and on Fridays I take Spanish from Brianna Thatcher who has her class down at Tiki Todd's which really helps but uh I can get by now I'm in no way shape or cut form conversational but I can like when I go to the pharmacy I can ask for what I need and do it correctly and the appreciation I get for just trying the people the people are just wonderful about that so I continue my goal is to be conversational but it's a long ways off but the the more I learned the easier life is so if you have the opportunity if you're going to move down here start before you get here I am really jealous of this kind of compound that they have here of of Renters of neighbors they you know they post to Facebook that they're all getting together Z was going overseas and I saw all the pictures and I'm like I want that I want that community so it's interesting when you're looking for a house in Mexico I know also up in the hills off of 19 there's another small 12 unit um there's there's a bunch of homes we have a bunch of friends who live in there and they're all connected or a centenario real I see those guys getting together all the time so you can definitely come down to Mexico and buy into or rent into a community that's really great and that you can really enjoy being part of that but Terry just mentioned something and I want him to repeat it really about enjoying life so let's switch back to Terry so we just had a quick Interruption because someone was yelling Terry Terry and I look inside the house there was someone inside his house delivering his soup delivery I just wanted to tell I want to talk about this because this is just it's it's just such a I don't want to call it a symptom but it is the things that happen in Mexico yeah that was Janet uh bringing my Japanese foe from Claudia who has crave it Foods on Saturdays she's in the market in La Paz and if you can't make it to the market if you order ahead she'll bring it back here and deliver it for you so it's just so nice and it turned out that Janet was getting something too and I was tied up at the time so she got it for me and it's everybody's like that it's amazing so let's switch back to what we were about to talk about which was enjoying life and the importance on that it's so easy to take the beauty and wonder of this place for granted I mean the ability to plan something and not have to check the weather before you do it I I told him that I wake up every morning and look out the window and look at the palm trees across the street from where I live and tell myself don't ever start taking this for granted it's it's it's a gift it's not leaveless cottonwood trees in Nebraska in the middle of the winter those are palm trees over there and the weather's beautiful and the people are beautiful so I keep reminding myself appreciate this every day so there you go that is your message for the day is to uh get out there and appreciate life uh there's some more videos over here that you could appreciate and you know hopefully I will see you soon down here in Mexico La Paz is great but there are so many other places in Mexico that are just as wonderful hope to see you in one of them hasta luego

Channel: Almost Retired in Mexico

Views: 232,203

Keywords: Retire in Mexico, Pretirement, Living in Mexico, retire in mexico, moving to mexico, moving to mexico from us, moving to mexico from usa, el centenario mexico, la paz baja california sur, Moving to Mexico nearly KILLED him, leave the rat race move to mexico, should i move to mexico, is mexico safe, retire to mexico

Id: ufo9Lz7zop4

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 12 2023