Reply To: Had my surgery done finally – Shouldice

[Watchful]

Thanks, Chuck. I’m optimistic since there has been a significant improvement since the surgery. I just hope it continues improving all the way to complete resolution, and I don’t get stuck with chronic pain. This stuff is really scary.

I had my hernia since birth, and it got worse over the years. The right time to fix it was when I was a baby. It’s a trivial surgery at that point. My parents weren’t thinking rationally about it, and didn’t do it.

The hernia was bothering me only occasionally, so I didn’t feel compelled to do the surgery. I did notice that it was growing in recent years, and that should have prompted me to do something about it, but I was too busy with other things, and didn’t feel like doing surgery on something that wasn’t bothering me all that much. It started bothering me much more frequently a bit over a year ago, but I took my time researching what to do because I found out that deciding on how to treat it isn’t so simple.

I’m not sure I would have been able to pull the trigger before it started bothering me more, and before I noticed that intestine was going in there, and that the hernia was reaching into the scrotum. As we all know, the risk of complications from inguinal hernia surgery is far from insignificant, so who wants to take that risk on something that isn’t all that bothersome? The risk of incarceration and strangulation is known to be quite small. It’s a tough dilemma, but, yes, for those who want tissue repair, I think there’s a good argument for fixing it sooner rather than later. I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time. There’s probably not as much urgency with mesh.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by  Watchful.