Kugel Mesh Infection: What's a Busy Mom to do?

Huntsville, ALImagine. You've got 3 kids, ages 15, 13 and 10. Children at an age where they are active socially. It's a busy age. Any parent would be hard pressed to keep up with them. Now, imagine if you were a parent saddled with a Kugel Mesh patch—and worse, a hernia patch that had been recalled. That Kugel Mesh is now inside of you, a recall that you heard about on TV. You have no health insurance. What to do?

Such is the story of a mother of 3 from Huntsville, Alabama. Marie (not her real name) looks back on her hernia surgery with the usual hope and optimism that anyone facing such a surgery would feel. Hernias can be awful; they can be painful and slow you down. A busy parent can't afford to be in a position where she can't keep up with her kids.

And so Marie had the hernia repaired with the Kugel Mesh a number of years ago. Then came the pain, which Marie describes as intermittent burning at first. She also felt that she just wasn't healing properly. There was a discharge coming from the incision, and she was also experiencing muscle spasms. It was like her belly was on fire, she says.

Marie had no idea what might have been causing her pain, which had since morphed from occasional to constant, until she was watching TV one night and learned about the Kugel Mesh recall.

Suddenly she knew what her problem was, the now-constant burning, and the discharge that continued to seep from her navel. The muscle spasms she likened to the kick from a developing fetus in the womb.

Needless to say, the failed Kugel Mesh has affected her life. "It has affected my day to day life. I was a child caregiver and I had to quit because I could not pick up the kids," she says. "I couldn't pick them up at all. I can't do laundry because there are 2 steps up into my laundry room and I can't lift anything over 8-10 pounds, so I can't lift my laundry into the rooms. When I do, I feel a ripping pain in my stomach. I can stand up and do dishes and cook, but I can't lift things."

The Kugel Mesh was developed to minimize the invasiveness of hernia surgery. A folded mesh would be inserted into the abdominal cavity through a catheter, together with a plastic collapsible memory ring, which would deploy, and hold the mesh in place at the desired location. However, it was later determined that the memory rings were prone to breaking at the welds, producing sharp edges which could potentially pose a risk to internal organs. The memory rings were recalled, and the welds strengthened.

However, that doesn't help the thousands of Kugel Mesh patients like Marie, many of whom have yet to develop symptoms, but live in constant fear that the other shoe is about to drop.

In the case of Aaron Menendez, the other shoe dropped him into the grave. Two years after receiving a Kugel Mesh patch to repair a hernia, Menendez developed a serious infection and died in September of 2007. At the time, it was reported that an autopsy found that the cause of the infection was a defective Kugel Mesh patch. The Kugel Mesh recall, as it happened, came shortly after his operation. Menendez was not one of the lucky ones to have no problems stemming from the patch.

Marie, meanwhile, faces an additional surgery to resolve her problem. But worse than that, is the recovery time she is facing, that will take her away—again—from her family. She'll be there with them, but she won't be there for them, as she faces another long recovery.

It is not known if anyone from Bard and Davol, the makers of the Kugel Mesh patch, will be around in Marie's house to help her out with her kids…