Good intentions
Forum Replies Created
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It was a very long Topic with many participants and many replies. The forum software should have recovery features if it was accidentally deleted.
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If you go to ajm22’s profile you can go back to his first posts and see the progression of his journey. He started where you are now. He talked to many many people and had several friends/acquaintances who had had mesh repairs. They told him that he might as well get it done, although some of them seemed not quite happy with the results, if I recall right. I got the impression of people resigned to their fate, suggesting that there was no better way available.
He had the mesh implantation, then some years later had it removed. You’ll have to read the old posts to get the full story. If they are still available.
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It’s human nature to want other people to come along with you when you take a risk. ajm22’s friends told him the same thing.
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If there are questions about certain posts I hope that she will just remove those and leave the rest. It would be ironic to have a session about gaslighting then remove a whole multipage thread about the best pure tissue repair. At least give a reason.
Hoping for the best…
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I feel normal as far as planning a day or week or month’s activity, but the surgery area is definitely not normal. It’s still stiff and thick but seems to be getting more flexible with time. I still have pre-hernia blue jeans that I hope to be able to wear again someday, but can’t now because the thick band of tissue creates pressure in the groins when it’s compressed by tighter pants.
Overall it feels like I just have a thick layer of stiff tissue that is slowly regaining flexibility. I don’t try to stretch it because I think that the thick previously damaged tissue would probably hold or deform in some unnatural way and I’d probably end up damaging weaker “normal” tissue. I assume that the collagen replacement that is the basis of products like Ovitex is occurring, except in my case it’s replacing my own damaged tissue. It’s a slow process.
So, I’m happy that things are getting better and not worse but I try not to move things along too fast. Just thankful to be out of the mess I was in at the time.
Good luck. Take it slow. Be thankful. What else can a person do?
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So it’s been 4 1/2 years since I had the two pieces of Bard Soft Mesh removed (December 2017). It feels like ten years have passed. Over the last few months I’ve realized that I have not spent much time at all thinking twice about what I could or should do to avoid ending up with a sore lower abdomen and groin area. My range of activities, both duration and exertion, has extended out to where I finally feel normal again, all of the time. I do what I want to do and only have slight soreness at the spot of the remaining mesh piece, over the original direct hernia.
This should give hope, I hope, for anyone who is wondering if they’ll ever feel healthy again after mesh removal. But the time spent on this whole travesty is incredible, from implantation to give supposedly almost perfect immediate return to full fitness, through the pain and the waiting, and finally the removal, to today, has been 7 1/2 years. And I am just one of many.
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Here is another of his recent endeavors. I read through the APCO pages and job listings and they never explicitly say what they do. They seem to be a management consulting firm.
https://apcoworldwide.com/people/bruce-ramshaw/
https://apcoworldwide.com/about/mission-values/
Many words, but they don’t say much. From APCO’s Mission page –
“Our Mission
In a rapidly evolving global context and a time of transformational change, APCO strives to add value to our clients’ enterprises and benefit society. We enable clients to achieve their objectives through insightful counsel, compelling narratives and creative solutions.”
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Dr. Ramshaw’s career arc gets more fascinating. It seems that he no longer practices surgery and has gone completely over to something that looks like consulting in the business field. He is even teaching in the UT Haslam College of Business now, not the Medical school. His internet presence has become very self-promotional. Just a few short years ago he was a very vocal presence in the hernia repair world, helping to control the mesh-usage narrative.
Incredible.
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Here is the thread about the meeting, with my usual cynical comments. I really do feel bad for today’s surgeons. They just need to resist the corporate efforts. Start at the Hippocratic Oath and think in the long-term. Each surgeon has a responsibility for the rest of each patient’s life. Not just the 30 minutes for the surgery and the three months it takes for the paperwork to get finished.
https://herniatalk.com/forums/topic/international-hernia-collaboration-costa-rica-4-5-4-6/
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You might review the contributing surgeons page. It seems dated.
Many forums have a separate section for people to upload articles to. This might be a useful way to collect links to articles or actual pdf files, rather than trying to find old posts with the links.
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I see that it might just be a recycled article from 2021. The url says 2021, the title says 2022. Oh well.
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Here is a Topic I started a few years ago with some “good” stories.
https://herniatalk.com/forums/topic/successful-good-mesh-stories/
Here is another one that somebody else started on the topic. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, even though many of us on the forum were writing advice posts “in our heads” before hernia repair, to help guide people in their decision making after doing our own research, there just are not many people offering advice on where to go to get a good mesh repair, after they have it done. Even if you find a good story, the details of what, exactly, was done will probably be difficult to find out. There are so many material and methods out there nobody really knows what works and what doesn’t. Sorry. Good luck.
https://herniatalk.com/forums/topic/multiple-hernias-repair-success-stories-please/
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Here is an older thread where Dr. Kang talked about the various tissue repairs. He mentions the Bassini and what he calls the “corrupted” Bassini method.
I’ve also included a link to the Gibbeum hospital page which has the table I think that they are talking about.
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I think that it would depend on what your end goal is. You can be specific toward the doctor that implanted it but they have the mesh producer behind them, plus most of them don’t realize the harm they cause. You can try to impact the mesh producer but they are very powerful, with massive funding to pay their own team of lawyers.
Here is a couple of recent articles that give a pretty good picture of how things are out there. It’s good that you had a pretty healthy run, ten years, before you had problems. As far as the complex is concerned though, you’re a success. You were able to continue working, supporting the economy.
Mesh ads are directed at the surgeons. They believe the hype. The same people in industry that did transvaginal mesh are doing hernia mesh. It’s all one big market opportunity. The mesh makers just do the math on how to keep the profit margins up and pay out accordingly.
Good luck, but don’t get too caught up in trying to make somebody pay. There is a lot of money in hernia repair mesh.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/13/johnson-johnson-pelvic-mesh-implant-ads-case
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Dr. Yunis seems like a great place to start. Here is a link from a previous poster on the forum. Good luck.
https://herniatalk.com/forums/topic/serious-need-of-finding-the-top-doc-for-mesh-removal/
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Your surgery records, if they are correct, will tell you if there was any fixation used. Your surgeon might have already mentioned this as a reason it could not have moved. His overall response is not a surprise, it’s almost like surgeons are trained to say the things that you heard. They all say the same thing, there are years worth of stories like yours. Your case is even easier to move along, since you got COVID. Blame it on the coughing.
Here is the advice I offer to everyone who thinks that they might need to have mesh removed – find a surgeon that removes mesh, talk to them, and see if you trust them. There are surgeons that will remove mesh within months of implanting it, even the same mesh that they just implanted. Surgeons who have removed mesh understand that mesh does move even if placed properly initially. They also understand that some people’s bodies do not accept mesh as well as others. They’ve seen before and after and should know if removing yours will help or not.
If you give your general location you might get advice for a surgeon to see. Sorry that you got caught, especially being so close to making a radically different choice. I went down the same path. The mesh implantation just seems like it should work, it seems so logical. But it has unexpected side effects and that’s what is hard for everybody to accept, especially the surgeons.
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Dr. Wright. He uses robotic technology. Dr. Billing uses the older hand tools, at least he did when he removed mine. Good luck.
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If you put west coast in your title you might get more responses. Dr. Peter Billing in Kirkland WA and Dr. Andrew Wright in Seattle will remove mesh. I had also found a surgeon in the past Canada who will removed mesh.
Here are some links.
https://herniatalk.com/forums/topic/hernia-mesh-removal-surgeons-canada/