Our rental apartment here in Mazatlan is tiny. It’s almost new, has nice appliances, solar panels, water purification; however it has purple walls and an orange chair and a loud water pump on the roof directly above the bed. We are impatient to have a bigger place and to get our household items out of storage.

Our landlord couple has been renovating a house and going all out to make it very nice. It’s one level, has a pool and jacuzzi, and is even closer to the downtown area than our apartment. The rent will be high but we decided to rent for a year to be sure if we wanted to buy and what area of town we would prefer. Until……

The house is just 3 blocks from us and we stopped in from time to time to see the progress. I was impatient to see the tile and wall colors…..until I didn’t. They painted all the walls a saturated flat grey/blue. I struggled with that until I decided I could liven things up with red accents and pictures. Oops, no nails are allowed in the walls, therefore no pictures. The floor tile was a nice tan-like color with yellow splashes. That doesn’t exactly go with grey/blue but oh well. Then the bathrooms walls were tiled and they were shiny pure white. Big clash with the flooring. Then the landlady said she had ordered a sectional and it would be delivered soon. I asked what color it was and at first she didn’t remember and then said she thinks she ordered brown. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. How do you nicely ask a person if they are color blind?

Just to backtrack. In April we contacted a realtor that had a condo listing we were interested in but it went under contract the day after we looked at it. He went back to Canada and turned us over to a young newish realtor in his office named Elizabeth. Since about July she had emailed me with listings and none interested me but she kept trying to discern what exactly we wanted. I didn’t really know and I kept telling her I didn’t want her to waste time on us because we were so unsure.

The very afternoon that I learned about the brown couch, Elizabeth emailed that another agent in her office had a contract from a seller to list a condo on the malecon overlooking the ocean. He had not even taken pictures yet and it would be about 3 days before it went into the multiple listing service. He agreed to let us immediately view it and the minute we walked in the door I knew I wanted it. The newer condos are all so ultra modern and this one is 16 years old, very tastefully furnished and with basically the same colors as our house in San Carlos.

Below is our San Carlos living room and you can see we like a little life in our colors. I would have had to go on anti-depressants with those grey/blue walls.

I think we hit the jackpot with the condo and now we are just waiting for a closing date. Having a realtor that is new turned out to be a bonus because she actually looked for a property for us. The previous realtor sent us a list of websites to look on and expected us to find or own place. I hear that this is common in Mazatlan. And there is not one website to look on but several. Also, almost every choice property goes under contract within 24 hours. Every place we were interested in that we saw on those sites was actually already under contract but the realtors don’t remove them until after closing. Mazatlan is the hot place to move to right now.

We will be living on the 11th floor and that will take getting used to when we have always lived in houses. Steve is so happy to no longer have a house and yard to maintain. This will be truly a vacation 365 days a year.

One of our top reasons for moving to Mazatlan was to get medical care. Both of us still had outstanding tests to be taken care of and decided to stop trying in Tucson and get it all done much quicker in Mazatlan.

I had decided I no longer wanted to fly to Houston to see my doctor at MD Anderson for follow-up tests every six months only to have my flight cancelled after driving to Tucson. We arrived in Mazatlan on a Thursday evening. On Monday I called a doctor that was recommended. He answered the phone and I thought I had accidentally been given his personal number. He said to the contrary, he wants to talk to his patients. I explained what I needed and he made an appointment for the next morning.

The next morning after I told him what tests and lab work were required, he picked up the phone and called one of the hospitals and got me in that very afternoon for a neck ultrasound and also a mammogram because I needed that too. Office visit cost $25 dollars. Unlike in the US, an actual doctor of radiology did my ultrasound and told me to wait while he prepared a report. Ten minutes later he gave me a written report of the results and everything was good. Total cost for both tests: $95 dollars. Next I went to the lab for a series of blood tests and one of them is very expensive in the US. Cost was $100 dollars for all.

Then I needed a follow-up endoscopy and that was $400 dollars and my new doctor drove to the hospital and was there when the procedure was done under light anesthesia. Ulcers have healed, yay! But I still couldn’t eat many foods and the doctor prescribed a medication that is made in Italy that is not a proton inhibitor which I no longer wanted to take. It’s a liquid gel and what a miracle that medicine is.

Next, Steve needed a colonoscopy that he’s been trying to get for almost a year. It was cancelled once (after driving to Tucson), he changed gastro doctors and then the new gastro doctor, family doctor, and cardiologist all passed the buck to each other on who would manage his blood thinners. He’s on twice the dose that most people are on and has had some serious issues with clots and hemorrhaging over the years. None of the doctors would give Steve specific instructions other than to tell him to stop the blood thinners and inject himself with heparin. How, when, how long, dosages, the restart of thinners……vague.

We decided he would get the colonoscopy in Mazatlan. The instructions by our new doctor were clear and were written down. Total cost was $450. Normally it’s $400 but our doctor had an emergency doctor standing by in case anything went wrong with bleeding. Again, everything was good and now we are done after only two weeks in Mazatlan with all that was going to take many more months to do in the US.

There is a downside. If something serious happens suddenly where we can’t get to the US, we have no medical insurance here and can’t get any due to either/or our ages or for pre-existing conditions. We are committed to adding 1/3 of our income to a separate savings each month to be used only for hospitalizations. In Mexico, the hospitals want payment upfront via credit cards. And unlike in the past, from what we hear, the private hospitals are charging considerable more these days. This is a concern but what can we do about it?

Our family doctor is just fantastic. He’s a real human being. He makes house calls. He told us if we ever had an emergency, date or night, to call him and he would obtain transportation for either of us to a hospital but that he would probably be at our home before the ambulance. He told us not to call 911 because the ambulance companies are paid by the various hospitals to bring patients there and of course they pass the cost onto the patient. I hope we never find out but in the meantime we are under contract for a condo quite near our doctor’s office so that he won’t have to travel so far to see us in an emergency!