What are My Rights After Transvaginal Mesh Injury in Tucson?

CALL (800) 863-5312 to talk to a Tucson transvaginal mesh injury lawyer

Giving birth can be a wonderful time in a person’s life, but it is not without its stress on the body. About half of women who give birth experience some prolapse, though only one in five will need to seek medical help. Medical intervention used to come in the form of transvaginal mesh.

Now that we understand the risks associated with the use of transvaginal mesh, it is no longer used. This article describes what a transvaginal mesh injury is, how you can recover if you have suffered a transvaginal mesh injury in Tucson, and why you should consider contacting a personal injury lawyer near you.

If you or a loved one has suffered a transvaginal mesh injury in Tucson, call the Tucson transvaginal mesh injury attorneys at (800) 863-5312. The Zinda Law Group lawyers who are familiar with this type of case will give you a free case evaluation.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AFTER TRANSVAGINAL MESH INJURY

In order to decide whether or not you should consider hiring a Tucson transvaginal mesh injury lawyer, you might want to know the process for gaining compensation. First, you should know that the legal process can be long and daunting to navigate without an attorney, especially if you have not gone through it before. An attorney can ease some of this burden simply by his or her familiarity with the system.

Your Legal Right to Compensation

The compensation available in transvaginal mesh injuries includes economic and noneconomic damages. Economic damages include the costs of any surgeries or follow up appointments that the transvaginal mesh caused; for example, if you need life-saving surgery because the transvaginal mesh perforated your bladder, the expense of that surgery and any other treatment after that surgery are the economic damages you suffered from the mesh. Additionally, your missed wages from time off of work during such surgeries and aftercare are included in economic damages.

Noneconomic damages are especially important in transvaginal mesh cases because they cover the pain and suffering you experience as a result of the mesh. Experiencing relapsed POP or pain during sex from the transvaginal mesh is not only physically uncomfortable but also emotionally damaging.

In order to reach the step to get compensated, you will need to file your claim, gather the proper evidence, and negotiate a settlement. If you are unable to reach an acceptable settlement with the manufacturer, you may need to go to trial to get the compensation you deserve.

Filing a Claim

The first step in the legal process is to file your claim. As we pointed out earlier, you will need to identify the correct defendant to sue. From there, you must ensure that you are filing in the correct court, within the statute of limitations, with the correct formatting, and with the correct legal claim. For an experienced injury attorney, this step is simply routine.

Gathering Evidence

Since the harms of transvaginal mesh have been well-documented, it should be relatively easy to gather evidence for your recovery. Depending on when you decide to file your claim, you should also include evidence of follow-up surgeries to correct your injury and the costs of those subsequent surgeries. If you need to have part of the transvaginal mesh cut out due to perforation or some other defect, then you may be able to present the mesh itself as evidence.

Be sure to also keep documentation of all of your medical bills and your time off of work to show how much money you have spent trying to fix the transvaginal mesh injury. This will help determine an appropriate settlement amount.

There may be other kinds of evidence specific to your case that could help you recover. It is best to consult with an attorney to ensure that you do not miss any opportunities for recovery.

Negotiating a Settlement

In what will hopefully be your last step, you must negotiate a settlement with the medical device manufacturer that produced the transvaginal mesh. At this point, the manufacturer will have faced thousands of lawsuits like yours already; therefore, they will try to write you the smallest check possible. However, you deserve full compensation for the injury that the manufacturer’s mesh caused.

Without an attorney, you might be intimidated into answering questions in depositions and interrogations in ways that damage the strength of your case. A personal injury lawyer knows how to help you answer questions from the manufacturer’s lawyers in a way that can help rather than hurt your case so that you can get the largest settlement possible for your claim.

What is a transvaginal mesh injury?

In order to fully understand how women have been injured by transvaginal mesh, it is important to understand how and why surgical mesh was and is used. “Surgical” mesh more broadly describes the mesh that is used to help women with pelvic floor issues. The mesh can be made from synthetic materials or animal tissue, though synthetic polypropylene is used most often for pelvic floor interventions.

Surgical Mesh as Treatment for SUI and POP

Surgical mesh is still safe to treat stress urinary incontinence (SUI); SUI occurs when urine leaks unintentionally because of a physical movement or activity that puts pressure on your bladder. It is important to note that the use of mesh to treat SUI is much different from the use of mesh to treat pelvic organ prolapse (POP). To treat SUI, a surgeon goes through the vagina to implant surgical mesh urethral slings to support the bladder neck or the urethra.

POP occurs when the pelvic floor weakens, causing pelvic organs to fall out of place and bulge into the vagina. In the surgery to treat POP, a surgeon implants surgical mesh to reinforce the weakened vaginal wall. While surgery was once performed by going through the vagina using mesh, it is now done through the abdomen.

Injuries from Surgical Mesh

There are many top-notch gynecologists in Tucson, and they are not necessarily to blame if Tucson women suffer injuries from transvaginal mesh. Rather, these injuries are the legal responsibility of the manufacturers of the mesh, and we will discuss that more later.

Unfortunately, many women who undergo a surgery involving transvaginal mesh can experience permanent injuries. Since your body heals from the surgery by integrating the mesh with its tissue, it can be very difficult to correct the injuries that transvaginal mesh causes. The following are a few of those injuries:

• Bleeding or hemorrhaging that indicates bigger problems with the mesh
• Mesh erosion into the bladder or rectum, often causing pain or infection
• Perforation from the mesh puncturing other organs such as the bowels or bladder
• Mesh contractions in which the mesh tightens the vaginal area and causes pain
• Recurrence of POP and SUI