Reply To: Watchful, could you summarize your experience at Shouldice?

[Good intentions]

Was the “other issue” in the groin known before surgery or discovered during surgery? I don’t want to dig in to the details of your ordeal but it kind of confuses the overall assessment of the Shouldice experience. Did they make the situation better or worse? Could there have been better planning if they had known?

I don’t know how much you’ve disclosed to other people about who you are but, really, we’re all anonymous here. Except for the people who use their real names. Even then, not many people will find the name on a hernia discussion forum.

Your comment about the duration of living with the indirect hernia shows that you realize that your situation is not “run-of-the-mill”. The thought occurred to me that watchful waiting can have the downside of letting the body change to adapt to the hernia, especially for those with direct hernias. Newly stretched tissue. Then when it is finally repaired the body has to re-adapt or go back to its previous state. A much better selling point for hernia repair than “you could die due to a strangulated hernia”. In your case, of course, you had already been waiting since birth so no significant time-based decision to make there. But for other people maybe it matters.