Mesh victim: ‘I can’t lift my grandkids’
It’s more than five years since we first started looking into reports of commonplace surgical mesh products causing extraordinary pain and damage to patients.
It was a woman named Heather Anderson who first stepped up to tell her story. Few others were talking. The mesh was implanted to deal with hernia, pelvic organ prolapse and stress urinary incontinence. These are the kinds of health complications that affect many people, yet are difficult to talk about.
Anderson had been in pain for eight years since the mesh was implanted to repair a hernia. But when journalist Chloe Johnson first told Anderson’s story in August 2012, her concerns were dismissed by surgeons, health regulators and ACC.
‘‘They told me the pain was in my head,’’ Anderson recalls now. ‘‘Well, I didn’t have the mesh put in my head!’’
Emboldened by Anderson’s bravery, more and more women and men came forward, and we kept telling their stories.
I remember talking to West Coaster Heather Mehrtens, who had lost her husband Geoffrey to mesh complications; to mum-oftwo Alison Lee, living a pain nightmare; Sheree Freer, whose mother Karyn died following surgery to remove mesh.
This week, MedSafe announced it was banning the use of surgical mesh in some cases. On its own, this is not a solution, but it is long overdue recognition by health authorities that there is a problem.
It should be noted that mesh provides an effective solution for many hernia cases. But the number of ACC claims are growing – surgeons must be careful.
The support group Mesh DownUnder is calling for a register of mesh procedures, so surgeons can understand how and when it goes wrong. Top Canadian surgeon Robert Bendavid is poised to come here to train New Zealand surgeons in removing the mesh. And Auckland University’s gynaecology professor Cindy Farquhar is hoping to lead a comprehensive study into mesh complications.
So there is hope – for some. This weekend Anderson told me her pain has only got worse. She says the public hospital will not remove the mesh, because the private hospital that implanted it has lost her surgery notes. And she was in court just last month, still fighting ACC for compensation.
The 67-year-old Aucklander has three grandchildren. ‘‘I can’t pick the kids up,’’ she grieves. ‘‘I can’t do anything with them. I look like death warmed up.’’
But amid her pain, the MedSafe decision provides a ray of light. It was vindication that the mesh problem was not in her head.
And, she said, it provided hope that other people would not suffer the same.