Rachel Rodriguez, a 35-year-old mother who sells shoes in this quiet city on France’s Atlantic coast, has stopped exercising. And, she said, she developed psoriasis on her scalp from anxiety and lost 24 pounds in a month.
“She is glued to the Internet, doesn’t sleep or enjoy life anymore,” said her husband, Jean-Marc, a security guard. “We’ve fallen into real paranoia.”
Ms. Rodriguez is one of the 30,000 Frenchwomen who were given the implants, which were filled with an industrial-grade silicone and are more likely to rupture or ooze than those made from surgical silicone. About 300,000 women across 65 countries received the implants.
The problems with the implants were first revealed in 2010, when the French government ordered their withdrawal from the market, though at the time it did not recommend their removal from those who already had them. But women with the implants got a fresh jolt in November news broke that a woman whose suspect implants had leaked had died of a rare form of lymphatic cancer.
While French health officials said the gel carried no known link to cancer, the news had many women here hurrying to have their implants removed, lest they rupture and spread a potentially toxic gel in their bodies.
?milie Germain, who received the faulty implants in 2009, said she had noticed several lumps in her breasts and often felt a burning sensation. But she was not sure what to make of it.
“I feel like I’m having symptoms that aren’t real,” she said. “It certainly comes from anxiety.”
In December, French health officials recommended that women have the implants removed as a preventive measure. The government has said that it will cover the cost, but that it will pay for new implants only for women who had them for reconstructive surgery after breast cancer.
“Many women who come to us can’t pay for new breasts,” said Muriel Ajello, who leads a group defending affected women. “Those people are our priority.”
The women primarily fear for their health. Even so, many also joined Ms. Ajello’s association to be recognized as victims and fight against the perception that they were somehow at fault for having had the surgery in the first place. They pointed out that many women have implants after a mastectomy, or after extensive breastfeeding that can shrink the breast, and not just for vanity.
“We aren’t bimbos,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “We aren’t psychologically weak people, either.”
Ms. Rodriguez and the others criticized health officials and surgeons for not immediately alerting them to the potential risks. Some women even said that their surgeons had been absent or on vacation since news of the scandal broke. Others held the government responsible for waiting more than a year after the offending gel was withdrawn from the market before taking preventive measures.
They often compare the implant scandal to the outrage in the 1990s over contaminated blood, when the news media discovered that France’s National Center of Blood Transfusion had knowingly distributed AIDS-contaminated blood products to hemophiliacs in 1985. That case brought criminal prosecutions.
“We found out the truth only 15 years after it happened,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “I fear that this is going to happen with the implants.”
Many surgeons have tried to calm fears, saying that there was no evidence that the gel was harmful. But women with the implants said that they knew very little about the product.
“There hasn’t been any reliable medical expertise about it,” Ms. Germain said of the gel, adding that her surgeon had on his desk the files of 200 women waiting to have their implants removed.
“There are many rumors, and sometimes nonsense,” said a surgeon who had given several women the implants. “What struck me most is that no one until recently asked us to keep the implants with us for further analysis,” he said. He agreed to speak only if his name was not used, because of the possibility of litigation over the issue.
Annie Mesnil, a 65-year-old graphic designer and mother of three, had her right breast removed after she received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 1999.
“I couldn’t imagine myself living with one of my breasts missing,” she said.
She happily accepted her surgeon’s suggestion to have implants and asked no questions. “He said they had satisfying results, and I trusted him.”
In March 2010, when she found out that the company had stopped its production of implants, she had a scan that showed nothing wrong. But because she had already suffered from heavy chemotherapy and wanted to take no chances, she picked another surgeon and had her implants removed in June.
But the implants had already leaked. “They had ruptures of more than 10 centimeters deep in different places,” said Dr. Benjamin Pulvermacker, the surgeon who operated on Ms. Mesnil. “The gel had leaked, and I had to clean up the entire space where the implant was placed.”
Ms. Mesnil said that she felt like she has had a sword of Damocles over her head for the past six months, anxious about the consequences of the leakage. “The gel can infiltrate the body tissues, and no one knows if we can take all of it out,” she said.
Ms. Rodriguez has been coping with the same feeling of helplessness. She is counting the days before she has her surgery on Jan. 25. This time, she said, her surgeon told her of a Web site where she could choose different varieties and brands of implants.
“I’ll pick ones made of physiological salt solution,” she said. “They are translucent, and you can easily see through them.”
