A Wicked Web

Women with pelvic mesh injuries are back in court, still waiting for justice and compensation for the surgery that devastated their lives.

- Samantha Trenoweth

Eleven years ago, Justine Watson was working as a psychotherapist. She was married, caring for two sons with special needs (aged 10 and 16), living a sometimes stressful but rewarding and active life. Since her boys’ births, she’d had some incontinence – she peed when she laughed and wore a pad to the gym – but she was coping. Then her world came tumbling down.

“I had my 40th birthday in 2010 with my girlfriends in Bali,” she tells The Weekly. One night, she wet her pants (again) and her girlfriends said, “You know there’s a surgery for that.”

Back in Australia, Justine looked into it. She saw two specialists. The first scared her off. The second said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. You’ll be absolutely fine.” And she trusted him.

She remembers that consultation clearly: “He didn’t say he would insert a medical device that, once it’s in, can’t come out again; he didn’t say it’s made from polypropylene, that it causes inflammation, that scar tissue will form around it, that it will become part of your body and if your body rejects it, you are going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble. He said none of that.”

So Justine went ahead with what was supposed to be a very simple, 20-minute operation. “He said, ‘This is going to change your life’,” she remembers. “And it did, but not in the way he told me.”