The following deals with thoughts of suicide. For 24-hour mental health crisis support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. Linda Schultz and her teenage son live in crisis accommodation. Four rooms, crammed into 50 square metres. They rely mostly on charities for their food, and Newstart to help pay for other necessities. It wasn’t always this way. Linda, a single mother and former media executive, has been unable to work since experiencing complications from a 2016 surgery designed to treat urinary incontinence. The Melbourne woman had been fitted with a mesh ‘sling’ implant, a surgically inserted device designed to prevent involuntary bladder leakage; a condition that affects roughly one third of Australian women. However, she ended up requiring multiple corrective surgeries and living with excruciating pain after the mesh eroded into her vagina. Three years on, Linda lives with a nerve condition, suffers frequent infections and experiences intense pain […]