Your Turn: Husband on his Mesh-Injured Wife and Their Life

Mesh Medical Device News Desk, October 4, 2017~ Mesh injuries do not just impact a woman. Families are involved - children lose their mother, sisters suffer and so do husbands.

Some even leave.

The best of them stay, like this man.

He is anonymous but his words resonate with many. Thank you Katrina S. for bringing it to our attention.

In the winter of 2011, ******* and I started a relationship.

I thought she was a well put together woman that was full of life, energy, and self-motivated with long-term goals for her life. We were both ready to settle down, work hard and enjoy the rest of our lives together; which, we did for a very short time. We put our money together and started our own single truck owner-operator, trucking company. This allowed us to be together, work together, and travel the country, all the while working for our retirement.

Not long after we started our new investment and life together, we began to notice something was wrong with our sex life. In fact, she was experiencing severe pain during and after sex, and I was getting sores/scratches on my penis, unaware of the mesh even existing. This was before she found out the mesh was implanted and it had eroded through the vaginal wall.

You already know about the medical facts from her statement; but, I started a new life becoming her care giver, sitting by her side and comforting her as she goes through multiple doctor visits and surgeries. Watching her slowly change from the vibrant, energetic woman to someone who is in constant pain and suffering. We have spent so much of our time taking off of work loosing valuable time and money, not only in our business and investment, but in our personal life.

WikiCommons

The time we wanted to spend enjoying with each other and living this life of work and travel, now seems to be working to survive the time we spend in the doctor’s office, paying for what seems to be a never ending search for answers to the conditions that she is forced to live with now. It is not us traveling and enjoying the sites and adventures this great country has to offer while working towards retirement. It is working long weeks, 24 hours a day, so we can make it to the next doctor’s visit. It has gotten to the point where when we do travel; she cannot even get in and out of the truck. Most days she never even gets out of the truck to take a simple walk into the store to get her own food or drink because of the pain.

We never go any place where there are stairs, inclines or just general site seeing that involves extended periods of walking or sitting. We avoid restaurants, park benches or any seating arrangements that are not conducive to her inability to sit in a straight up position. She will literally just turn around and walk away from anything enjoyable, because she can’t sit if the seating is not comfortable. She can’t even lay down or relax to go to sleep without taking some type of medication. She can’t walk down her own driveway 100 yards to check the mail without some kind of assistance.

We can’t even have sex without me wondering how painful it is for her. This makes it worse when I am holding her while she’s crying herself to sleep because of the pain. She sometimes wants to give up because she worries about me. She worries she is letting me down and not being able to contribute to our business and personal life. It is very hard to watch someone that you love, admire and had everything going for them, miss out on life.

In the time we have spent since the diagnosis, I have watched her become less of a strong independent woman owning and running her own business into a dependent woman who is unsure if she can even get up and walk to the bathroom.

We have incurred multiple loans and debt from our family and taken out second mortgages to keep up with the costs of doctors, hotels, and travel to see these doctors. It seems we can’t stay at our business long enough to get ahead because we are constantly paying out dollars because of the mesh implant that she never asked for or ever knew she had in the first place.

It is a shame that the medical community can do this to people and continue the same to unsuspecting people in the future.

I feel that the manufacturer of this product has continually lied to the people and the physicians just to sell the product and be unconcerned of the risks involved. It is my wish that they would just realize and admit to the problems this product has caused and remove it from the market. It is sad that the manufacturer can say they now have a safe product and change some small print on a medical form, have the patient sign it and continue on down the destructive path of injuring and destroying the lives of innocent people that put their trust and lives in the medical industry and the physicians that supposedly care for them.

In closing, I feel that this product and its makers have taken away our business, personal and social life to the point that we may never recover. The losses we have incurred will continue to grow because it seems that no one can repair the physical or emotional damage that my wife and I have endured.

It is a tragedy that we, or anyone, has to suffer this way.

****