Have I messed up my hernia surgery?

I hope you don’t mind me chiming in on this since I am not a doctor, but it’s wonderful to hear a success story like this as a fellow patient. Many of us can relate to continual misdiagnosis and pain, and know the frustrations and dread that goes along with it. It’s good to hear you had the initial success, and hopefully this newer discomfort you have now is a quickly passing experience.

Is your current pain all the time, constant? Or does it only occur after specific movements? Does it only occur with specific exercises? Does the pain respond well to anything?

Does your current discomfort and pain feel like that same hernia feeling again? If so, perhaps a hernia recurred. Recurrence is rare, but it’s always a possibility with any hernia.

Also, scar tissue builds up around any injury or surgical repair site, and scar tissue can tear, and then it remodels over time. My understanding is that this scar tissue remodeling process basically happens constantly any time it is torn or adjusted, then it eventually settles. If you are actively exercising a region with scar tissue, this tearing/remodeling process is perhaps more likely? If so, it could be painful or aggravating as the process sorts itself out. A question suited for the doctors, certainly.

Finally, and this may not be relevant whatsoever to your case, but from what I have learned from my own journey. You have previously experienced a period of long term pain. A side effect of long term pain is that the patients body starts guarding the areas that hurt, whether intentionally or not, and this guarding can impact other mechanics of the body. So, theoretically, if you had pain in your groin or pelvis before, you may have adjusted your gait, posture, stance, activities, to accommodate that in an attempt to prevent aggravating the initial condition (the hernia). This could make it more likely to experience a strain, cramp, tightness, etc, in related regions, if they became tighter, weaker, or stronger to accommodate the guarded injury. It sounds like you are actively doing physical therapy which I would suspect is a good thing, though from personal experience having unrelated issues resolved with physical therapy, sometimes physical therapy is painful before it feels better again.

I hope any of this is helpful, if not, I’ll shut up now 😉 Anyway, check up with your doctors, they know best!