MacBook Pro will not mount or recognize external hard drive

Hoping someone can help me with this...

Like an idiot, I have never backed up my laptop to an external hard drive for the entire time I've owned it. It's a mid-2010 MacBook Pro, and I'm running the latest version of Mavericks. I plug in my WD My Passport hard drive and the little light on the hard drive flickers, so it is receiving power, but doesn't show up anywhere on my laptop screen. I cannot find it. Instead, what pops up is this error message:

NTFS-3G could not mount /dev/disk1s1

at /Volumes/My Passport because the following problem occurred:

/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/fusefs.kext failed to load - (libkern/kext) link error; check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).

the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)

I am at a complete loss as to what to do. I last used this drive with a Mac, so it should be formatted correctly. I went into library -> filesystems -> fusefs and it wanted me to download an application to open it from the App Store. Does anyone have any clue as to what I should do? I tried my boyfriends' external drive as well and his gave me the same message.