Kugel Mesh means Perforation, Infection, and Additional Surgery

Boston, MAImagine having a hernia repair, only to find a lump develop in your abdomen. How scary is that? Then you discover that something went wrong with your Kugel Mesh patch, after the defective Kugel mesh memory ring perforated your bowel, and the mesh patch stuck to it. The result is a litany of health problems that simply will not go away.

That's what happened to Marnie (not her real name). It was 2003, and Marnie went in for what she thought would be a fairly routine hernia repair. All seemed to go well, and Marnie returned home and resumed her normal life.

Now, to answer anyone's question if a Kugel Mesh patch can go wonky years after being implanted? The answer is yes. And Marnie is proof.

Sometime during a 3-year period something happened inside her abdomen. Something was building, of which she was not aware until the spring of 2006, exactly three years after her initial surgery. Marnie reported sudden bouts of nausea, pain, redness and swelling of her abdomen. There was a lump there, now.

Her doctor mistakenly believed that Marnie had developed another hernia, and scheduled her for more surgery to repair what he thought was the problem.

It wasn't until he ventured in during the second surgery that the doctor realized the true nature of her trouble. A perforation of her intestines had occurred, a massive infection had set in, and the Kugel mesh patch was now adhering to her intestine.

The only thing the surgeon could do was to remove the mesh, together with about three inches of Marnie's bowel. He also could not replace the mesh, meaning that Marnie—on top of all her other problems—was in danger of acquiring another hernia.

Marnie was in hospital for five days. That's five days of care; together with an additional surgery that either cost Marnie, or her health care plan thousands of dollars it would not have had to pay out had the Kugel mesh not failed in the first place.

Marnie's ordeal wasn't over yet. Her doting son Sean took his mother home, and cared for her. He had explicit instructions on how to care for the wound that remained from the extraction of the drain tube, which Marnie required for her hospital stay. The drain tube, implanted after surgery, drains the abdomen of excess fluid during the first stages of the healing process.

There was an expectation of some "leaking" out from the drain tube wound, once Marnie returned home. However, the opposite was true. It was a gusher. Fluid began, to paraphrase Sean, 'pouring out.' He described the fluid as putrid and utterly disgusting—obviously the remnants of a serious infection not yet successfully mitigated. For days, every time his mother would sit up, the stuff would ooze out.

Back to the doctor she went, and was put on a week's worth of robust anti-biotic. Recovery time from the initial ordeal would be measured in months. But they weren't done with her yet.

As her doctor had predicted, she required another hernia operation to repair the new hernia that did, indeed emerge. Her son is thankful that his mother survived the ordeal, but is angry that Davol, the manufacturer of the Kugel Mesh patch, allegedly knew about deficiencies with the mesh, and the memory ring, in 2002—a year before his mother had her procedure, but did nothing about it.

Thousands of people have been affected by the Kugel Mesh patch, and hundreds of Kugel Mesh lawsuits have ensued. The lucky ones, despite their ordeal with their hernia repair, survived.

Many did not.