News Feed Discussions How to overcome fear/anxiety and make yourself accept that you need surgery? Reply To: How to overcome fear/anxiety and make yourself accept that you need surgery?

  • Watchful

    Member
    February 21, 2023 at 3:11 pm

    Thanks – I hope you’re right and I’ll manage to recover fully. It feels like I still have some tissue that needs to recover from the surgery. There’s pain in a number of places which feels like injured tissue. Also, an irritated or damaged nerve. None of it is severe enough to be debilitating, and it’s not constant, although when I press in certain areas, there’s pain that’s always there. Regardless, it’s certainly bad-enough to be quite annoying on some occasions every day. The overall picture is better, but not each and every symptom. Some areas still have as much pain as after the surgery, and some are better. The nerve issues actually got worse until recently, and then improved a bit. Since I now reached the 3 month mark, I guess I’m officially in the “chronic pain” category, although it’s not severe in my case thankfully.

    By the way, they aren’t particular at all about patient selection. At Shouldice, they have a BMI limit, and they refuse patients with some comorbidities. That’s about it. Kang and Tomas have an even lower bar. As I mentioned before, I think the top German surgeons handle this better using careful ultrasound imaging in advance to make an initial assessment of the best approach, and then also taking into account what they encounter during surgery. It doesn’t make much sense to subject the patient to an overly traumatic surgery which can be avoided with the use of mesh. Having said that, who knows what would have happened if I had used mesh. I would have most likely had an easier surgery, but maybe I would have suffered from mesh-related issues.