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Something with hernia mesh or sports hernia?! PLEASE HELP!!!!
Hello,
I’m having a hard time figuring out what is wrong with me. I had an inguinal hernia repaired with mesh laparoscopically a couple years ago and having pain again after a few years.
I don’t have pain coughing or sneezing. do I maybe have a sports hernia? recurrent hernia? something with mesh?
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5 Replies
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There is a new “sticky” at the top of the forum’s main page, about sports hernias.
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Where are you located?
Unfortunately there are not many sports hernia experts in the USA (or the world!) but here are two that are fairly well known and often mentioned on these forums and elsewhere:
– Dr William Meyers in Philadelphia PA
– Dr William Brown in Fremont California
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Here is that link.
http://www.rimed.org/rimedicaljournal/2016/10/2016-10-31-sports-cohen.pdf
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Here is that link. I just got locked out of another thread though so it might not make it.
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“Sports hernias” aren’t really hernias. The proper name of the condition is athletic pubalgia. It’s typically from overuse, not one-time actions. I posted a link in the post after this one, just in case the site locks me out. It doesn’t like links.
The mesh used for hernia repair is not actually made of flexible material. The polypropylene or polyester fibers are not very elastic. They are woven in to a cloth that is flexible on a large scale, by letting loops and knots bend and the fibers slide past each other. After it’s placed in the body and tissue ingrowth occurs, the knots get locked up and the mesh becomes stiff and non-extensible, less flexible than the abdominal wall was before it was implanted. It doesn’t stretch anymore. It actually shrinks. So you might have overstressed the repair site, stretching your abdominal tissue to a level higher than it’s seen, and either pulled an area of mesh free from the surrounding tissue, or torn/stressed some tissue at the edges of the mesh.
Hopefully your body will re-adapt to whatever has happened. But the concept of the mesh repair is that it becomes a permanent part of the abdomen, so trying to help your body adapt to the new damage is about the best you can do. Good luck. Don’t try to treat it like a muscle injury, which will typically respond well to daily activity. I’ve found that waiting a few days for things to settle down completely then ramping back up works better.
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