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3 Years since surgery
Well folks here it is. A few days ago marked the 3 years mark since I had surgery with Dr. Brown. Seeing a bunch of my friends and colleagues perform with Rihanna at the Superbowl last night reminded me that its been 3 years and I thought it was time for an update. If this didn’t happen to me I would’ve probably been on that stage with them.
3 years ago I was a professional dancer with a resting bpm of 51, I did not drink nor smoke and had incredibly conditioned and healthy tissue health. No hernia, no bulge. I walked into surgery as the guy on the first picture and 90 minutes later walked out as the guy in the last 2 pictures and have been that person ever since.
Right before this surgery I had just declined to perform for a gig at the Grammy Awards and had just auditioned for a Disney movie. 3 years later the most physical thing I can do is go for a 60 minutes walk every 3-4 days. For the last 3 years I have not had any core or groin strength/tension, no hip stability, no knee stability, back issues, and much more.
I have not slept a single full night of sleep in 3 years. I wake up multiple times every night in shock and asking myself how someone could do this to another human. How this happened to me. My hair has been greying at an incredible pace from the stress. I’ve been told I most likely have PTSD and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do any physical activity or have any kind of life. I have been trying to find help but I can’t fault doctors for not knowing what to do with me. I walked in a perfect canvas of a patient and walked out like someone ran an immersion blender through my groin. Nothing happens when I do rehab, nothing is able to fully flex or retain tension. Its really a weird feeling day after day to just walk around with abdominal tissues/groin tissues that feel like pulled pork. Imagine someone detached your bicep from its extremity and then asked you to do bicep curls. Nothing would happen.
Every year I tell myself this year I’ll find some help but the reality is you cannot undo this type of damage. Its not possible to get this type of damage accidentally either. And if I find a brave soul of a doctor that cares, I risk losing my testicles. I risk nerve pain. More scar tissue pain. More weakness.
My life is incredibly miserable. I miss my life, I miss my friends and what I did in life. I’m extremely lonely. My parents have been heartbroken for 3 years. I’m at a 50/10 discomfort/weakness levels throughout my entire body and I have equal amounts of pain than I had pre-surgery. Not a single positive thing came out of that surgery, he just hurt me. Really bad.
I don’t want to scare anyone with this I just hope this will make you be extra careful and really research a lot. I walked into this trusting that Dr. Brown really was specialized in athletes like he continuously advertised and in the end my life and my health were worth less than the few thousands of bucks he made from doing this to me and pretending he understood what he was doing.
As I continue to read google scholar and try to find someone who might be able to help me, I sincerely wish you all the best and I hope none of you ever end up like me. This is not a life.
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35 Replies
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Thank you so much for the great detail, Peter. I had no idea there was even such a thing as a non porous mesh. Interesting. And so sorry to hear about your car.
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Hey Peter,
I think you mentioned in one of your posts (unless I’m confusing it with someone else) that you had your external oblique opened up on your other side at some previous time in your life and Dr. Brown gave you 80-100% chance of success. Did dr. Brown operate on your other side too? And if so what repair did he do? Have you ever had mesh at any point?
Thanks
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So you went to Dr.Brown because you had a torn tendon or abductor and performed a inguinal repair. Most of the time a sports hernia or tendon year can reaper itself. The abductors attached to the pubic bone. Seems sketchy though he would not reattached the tendon or abductor and perform a inguinal hernia repair. Seems to me you mightve never needed anything done brother.
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@PeterC, thank you for your timely reply. I tried to engage with you long ago, as I followed your many postings. It is finally good to be in touch. Your reply unfortunately missed my meaning. First I never said you had a hernia (IH, that is). I have known for long yours is a sports hernia (the term, a misnomer). My previous post merely followed your reply when another member @David M invited you to post your surgery report:
“I [PeterC] don’t have to post my op report. … You can find the steps listed here
https://www.sportshernia.com/sports-hernia-approach/sports-hernia-options-operation/
The only step he doesn’t specify on the website is how [he treated the ‘leaves’ …].
…In the op report he specifies he cut… to create those leaves/flaps.”I note that you said you showed your op report to other surgeons for their opinions, so evidently you consider that op report to reflect accurately what Dr. Brown did or his version of sports hernia surgery. Thus the op report is important for understanding your case and situation. Because you didn’t answer my questions about the op report, let me cut to the chase as to what I think happened and possible remedy.
Assuming Dr. Brown is not a quack doctor—for he has helped many members/readers of this website and there appears a lack of abundance of his failures—and the MISSING step he applied to you but absent in his website explanation is an IH procedure, I propose he went on “auto pilot” during surgery, absentmindedly and wrongly applied the MISSING step for the wrong patient, resulting in a botched surgery and great harm to you.
Litigation seems the best avenue, one I believe this surgeon would applaud. However I believe I read a long time ago you did not want to litigate. Your decision seems illogical. It would likely reward you with sufficient funds needed to cover your medical expenses past and present. Your decision so seemingly misguided makes me think you already sought legal redress but could not find any firms to take up your case. If so, it may be because your case was not strong enough to do so. Could it be that they saw little evidence of medical malpractice? If so, then wouldn’t your descriptions of Dr. Brown be rather biased?
I am sorry, really am, that you have been so terribly harmed physically and spiritually as well. You were crushed, really crushed. Here we try to understand why it happened–for isn’t that your purpose? But it doesn’t make sense because Dr. Brown aided IH so much in the past. It’s a disconnect. So why shouldn’t we be surprised and want to know more about it? Given your many dispersions against him, it is reasonable for me to ask for clarity. You though seem to have avoided clarifying your op report, a document you yourself consider central to your situation. Your previous reply (“a wall of text,” your own words) seems a cloud cover. Can you come clean?
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by pinto.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by
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How do you know your spermatic cord is “just under the skin”?
Regardless of whether it was needed or not in your case, dissecting and reconstructing the inguinal floor shouldn’t cause the symptoms you have.
What he did with your external oblique is not clear.
Something seriously destructive must have been done to cause the extensive problems you’re describing, but it’s not clear what it was, and it sounds like it wasn’t clear to the surgeons with whom you consulted either. It doesn’t sound like they even have a theory, right? Someone mentioned a nerve, but what could that be? There are no motor nerves there in the anterior groin other than for the cremaster/dartos.
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Hi Peter –
Given the spermatic cord situation, do you have any testicular pain? I can’t recall if you’ve mentioned that before.
Thanks
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@PeterC, you report your operation followed the same steps for sports hernia as on the doctor’s website except for an unspecified step he did on you. Is this step a inguinal hernia surgery procedure? If not, then why did you go on to report that you had no hernia? (I realize of course “hernia” in sports hernia is a misnomer.)
Also, are the steps/procedures for sports hernia outlined on the website considered standard for that surgery? Given that you direct us to the website description in lieu of your doc’s surgery report, then means he followed the website’s outline except for the unspecified, missing step?
Finally, and I would ask any patient, how reliable can that surgery report be? If a quack doctor, then surely the report is likely cooked.
Finally still, I take it that your later consultations with other surgeons revealed to you that your doc did unexplainable procedures. What did these surgeons say about your doc’s surgery report? Did they disagree with his procedures as written in the report?
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I think that was in the context of laparoscopic neurectomy.
The nerves encountered in the anterior surgeries like Peter had are supposedly all sensory in that area even though they are mixed sensory/motor further up. The only exception is the genital nerve branch which provides motor innervation to the cremaster.
One thing I always wondered about is whether damage to these distal nerves can lead to more proximal damage in the area where there’s motor function as well, but I never read about such a mechanism. Damage in the other direction does happen – proximal damage leads to distal damage through the process of Wallerian degeneration.
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Let me rewrite that sentence.
I know that in one of the herniatalk videos it was discussed that contrary to some belief that these nerves have no motor function, that if one of the nerves in that area is cut that it can indeed cause a loss of core function -
I know that in one of the herniatalk videos it was discussed that contrary to some belief that one of the nerves there being cut can cause a loss of core function. Now that may have been with lap surgery where the nerve is damaged more upstream. Not sure and I don’t know which nerve it is.
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Peter, you wrote
“Now everything is just jello. The separation between my rectus muscles, my groin, my obliques, etc. All jello.”
You ascribe that to surgical slicing and dicing of the your external oblique, etc. However your description also seems consistent with muscle paralysis (e.g. from motor nerve damage). Can you voluntarily contract your abdominal muscles, or are they “jello” and you have no control over them?
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It’s not clear if and how what he did was different from Desarda. With Desarda, you have the remaining two edges of the EOA which can be pulled together and closed over the repair. The spermatic cord is under that closure of the EOA.
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Peter, I highly recommend that you watch the 12 minute Desarda video. Not saying that it will answer all your questions, but what you will see there is Desarda creating “leaves” that wouldn’t be considered “flaps” and then using them in overlapping fashion. When he uses the word leaves, he’s only cutting the aponeurosis inline with the fibers, but not the other two cuts that you think Brown made. I think youre referring to a flap as meaning having three sides of a rectangle detached. I’m not saying that Brown didn’t make the other two cuts, forming flaps instead of leaves, but Desarda shows that the external oblique aponeurosis can be overlapped without making “flaps”
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Would Desarda be classed as a standard tissue repair Watchful?
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Yeah, Peter, that description of your surgery has so many things that seem odd. The three things that stand out to me are 1)the cutting of the external oblique against the fibers 2) suturing that first flap to the transversalis fascia ( in the video Desarda sutures his version to the muscle) and then 3) closing the other external oblique flap below the cord, leaving the spermatic cord on top.
In the Desarda video, he only cuts the external oblique in line with the fibers. I assume you believe that by cutting against the fibers,the fibers permanently lose their strength?
I mean, your situation does seem pretty bizarre to me. Doctors that might wander in here and read this could possibly wonder whether maybe you’ve misinterpreted the report.Would you be willing to post the actual report?
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Standard tissue repair procedures (like Shouldice or Marcy) are a known entity and don’t change the anatomy in ways that would cause the issues you mentioned. The trouble they cause (in the bad cases) is almost always either recurrence or chronic pain.
A repair for recurrence is still possible, sometimes with another tissue repair, or more often with lap mesh. Serious chronic pain can often be treated with a neurectomy, but not always. This can be challenging with mesh as well, even with removal. I think mesh is a worse situation to deal with when it goes bad. Again, when compared to a standard tissue repair. Having said that, mesh is clearly a reasonable choice, and for certain anatomies it can be a better choice because tissue repair would be difficult or problematic.
If a surgeon rearranges your anatomy in some insane way, it’s a different situation. It sounds like this is what happened to you. However, this is not a standard hernia repair.
“Sports hernia” seems to be a term used for different types of overuse injuries which aren’t even truly a hernia. It’s really dangerous territory because surgeons get creative. It’s not a standard problem with standard well-studied surgical solutions as I understand it, but I haven’t researched it much.
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One last thing – sorry this website does not let you edit anything after like 10 seconds its incredibly clunky.
I genuinely believe after all these years that laparoscopic surgery with mesh is safer than tissue regardless of your issue.
When I went into this surgery with Dr. Brown my whole mentality was “as long as there are no foreign objects in me, I can rehab, I can do acupuncture if any pain, I can work with it.” I was made to understand that the only major risk of tissue repair is that it might tear again and will have to get repaired again.
But the truth is this is far far far far worse than any mesh. At least the mesh you have the option to have someone try to remove it and you still have normal muscle function.
In my case there is no inguinal canal anymore. There is no inguinal floor anymore. Its permanent tissue damage and permanent alterations to my anatomy which means I’ll never have functioning obliques or core again. Unlike a mesh – I can’t have someone undo that or remove it. Its permanent trauma, permanent damage.
So while all surgeries have risks, I genuinely believe that the risks of having a mesh or hybrid mesh put in by a good surgeon in the most minimalistic way possible is farrrrrrrr less risky than having someone plow through your groin and destroy your core function.
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Appreciate the replies fellas.
I just want to add the following information as well
I asked Dr. Brown if his procedure would in any way shape or form alter the physical appearance of my abdominals (due to the nature of my work our physiques are important) he said absolutely not. He said the only physical aspect would be the scar which I was okay with.
I asked if anything he’s about to do will cause weakness through the entirety of the abdominals and prevent me from flexing my core/using it/having full strength he said absolutely not. He said absolutely not. He said my left side which had never been operated on would be at 100% and my right side could be between 80-100% because I had already had a previous surgery where just the external oblique aponeurosis was opened and closed not altered.
He told me I would be back to sport in as long as 3 months. 3 years later I have not improved at all it is clear that my obliques are no longer functional which is why my core looks like that now.
This is the result of a surgeon who made up a procedure without any understanding of the human anatomy and how muscles work so he can make a little extra money tapping into the niche that are “sports hernias”. Its really really unfortunate but the damage is done and theres absolutely nothing I can do about it.
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Peter, I tried to read the earlier description that you made of your surgery with Dr Brown. I dont understand the part about the flaps, but I recommend you try to watch the ten minute video of the Desarda tissue repair that can be found on YouTube performed by desarda himself. It’s actually a pretty good video as far as these videos go. Desarda cuts out a section of the external oblique and uses it to support the posterior wall of the inguinal canal. This seems similar to what you described happened to you. The main difference being that after cutting out the section to use as a support for the posterior wall , Desarda reattaches the remaining external oblique to itself. Apparently when it’s done right, it works for some hernia repairs.
So, I’m wondering if Dr Brown got in there and ended up trying to repair a hernia.
For the record, I’m just a layman researching some of this because I have to get my own hernia fixed.
Stay strong,
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Just to clarify – it sounds like he did screw up on you, and that was wrong. This is one of the risks, though, with having surgery done. When considering doing surgery, the thought about what happens if the surgeon screws up should be on one’s mind. It happens even with good surgeons.
Humans do unpredictable things sometimes. It’s not right, but that’s what you have to deal with. It’s one of the many risks that should be weighed against the potential benefits when making a decision about surgery. It’s not even just the surgeon – the anesthesiologist can do something wrong or even the assisting nurses – the weakest link can get you. Once you put your life in people’s hands, you are taking a risk of suffering grave consequences from them making mistakes for whatever unpredictable reasons.
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