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Reoccurring inguinal hernia? Something else?
Hi there, I have a hernia tale and am hoping for some advice – this seems like an amazing forum and the perfect place to ask for some help.
Rather long-winded pathology, please bear with me.
20 years ago when I was 18 I had a right sided direct inguinal hernia repair (a pretty big one, bowel piece the size of a lemon hanging down into scrotum urgh!) using open mesh.
Painful as heck for a month, but latterly healed up pretty good. I wouldn’t say I ever fully regained my old speed/strength but aside from a rather odd quirk of the op – I developed the ability to kind of ‘tense’ my groin along the site of the scar tissue, which in turn raised my right testicle slightly, this is pretty odd right?! – I would say it was overall a success.
Fast forward five years (now 23 years old) and I have another op (again right sided, but no relation to original – this one was laparoscopic and repaired three small sports hernias – after a couple of years of quite bad chronic pain and misdiagnosis. Indeed, the surgery was exploratory as examinations/scans failed to pick up anything obvious.
Again, heals pretty well – I have had approx a couple of hundred achy days (to be expected I suppose) when I felt slight chronic pain plus couple of major-ish incidents over the ensuing years (one lifting luggage, another doing an inadvertent splits during a fell run, another one while squatting heavy weights etc.) but after a decent amount of rest (up to 6 weeks each time) and no small amount of worry everything seems to settle down.
Until this October (2017). Since the ops I’ve always found traditional crunches etc. almost impossible (pain in old scar areas) so have totally avoided. I then discover leg raises and ab wheel work don’t seem to cause a reaction, and start training abs like never before from around July-time.
A couple of months pass and all is – almost – well. I find I’m getting strange ‘whoosing’/pulsing feelings in my old scar areas, but no pain. Like an idiot I ignore. Then one morning I’m doing some very light ab wheel warm up work and – ouch – ‘something’ happens. Sorry I can’t be more specific; it isn’t a searing ripping pain like the inguinal or sports hernia injuries, just this weird feeling that something’s ‘moved’ or changed down there.
I knock the exercise on the head for the day and, fearing the worst, take it very easy over the next few weeks. Things get worse though, and I’m now getting a weird mixture of acute and chronic pain from my old *inguinal* scar area. I can feel gurgling sensations, and (perhaps) feelings of very slight movement which recall – but are nowhere near as pronounced – as my old inguinal hernia all those years ago. I also get scratching (mesh?), itching (healing?) feelings. I can’t run (or jog), row, lift weights etc as my groin feels very weak.
When I sit at my desk at work I can ‘feel’ the scar – it almost feels like a lump or a pressure, but there’s nothing physical on examination – GP confirms she can’t detect obvious inguinal hernia when I visit.
It’s now mid-December and I can’t deny that things have gotten slightly better. Acute pain has (fingers crossed) almost gone. I have really good days where I hardly feel any symptoms or pain and worse (but not terrible) days when aforementioned symptoms present and I basically feel v. uncomfortable. The weird gurgling/feeling like a part of my bowel is once again outside of my body feeling persists, which is *horrible* and some days my whole length of inguinal repair scar tissue throbs. This was definitely not the case in the two decades following the original repair.
So, I suspect partial reoccurrence of original inguinal hernia but – after this long and winding essay – what do people on this forum think?!
Many thanks in advance for any advice or insights you’re able to offer.
Rob
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3 Replies
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Hi all, quick update if anybody is interested. The Christmas period continued to be relatively pain free, at least in terms of anything acute. Chronic symptoms continued to recede somewhat, to the point were I gingerly returned to the gym with some very light jogging, simple core exercises and low-weight upper body dumbbell and body-weight training. At the end of each session I could ‘feel’ my groin, but in that manageable way that you often take on the chin when returning from injury when you’re trying to build things back up.
The ‘gurgling’ and ‘whooshing’ sensations also pretty much disappeared much to my relief as it gave me hope that whatever I’d done to myself was fixing itself on its own.
Then, two days ago, a nasty setback. After a 5 mile dog walk I developed an acute throbbing/burning pain deep inside my body (I believe it’s in the exact site of my original inguinal hernia repair) which again caused much consternation. This pain endured until this morning when – after a decent night’s sleep – it has mysteriously rectified itself much more quickly than I was expecting.
I still have residual itch/ache from inguinal area and my inguinal canal – right side – remains as tender as ever (though to be honest it’s been this way since I was 18 post-original op!) but I think I’m once again through the worst.
Overall though, I’m still puzzled by the pathology of this. I had dared to hope that I was definitely getting better without the need for surgery, and would now say that this current episode is by far the worse setback I’ve had since the original op (sports hernia viewed as a separate issue). Yet the disappearance of the systems that troubled me the most (the gurgling, whooshing, pulsing!) continue to give me hope while I go through the lengthy process that should finally result in examination by a specialist plus scan.
Thanks for reading and if anybody has any fresh thoughts it’d be good to hear them!
Happy New Year to all,
Rob
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Hi, thanks for replying. Inguinal hernia was mesh, 3 x sports hernia (in the one laparoscopic operation) were just sutured I believe. Still inclined to believe from symptoms so far that’s it’s something to do wit the former rather than the latter…
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How did they fix your “sports hernias”? Did they place mesh at that time?
I’m suspicious you have a recurrence.
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