I’m sitting at home right now a tad sore from having had a hernia operation. I’ve eschewed loritabs for a single tylenol tablet. The wingback chair my dear wife placed by our gas fireplace is comfortable but I’m not going to be finishing the raking of our lawn this fall.
I got to within a month of turning 61 before enduring a hernia. This is the first operation I’ve ever had. The anesthesioligist was impressed with my good fortune.
I think the surgeon told me that roughly 20 percent of men get hernias. I just tried to confirm this in a google search but couldn’t. However several sites called the problem “common.” When I told my church choir the other night that I might miss Sunday’s service I got lots of hernia stories. One soprano just had one fixed, a fellow bass had one fixed when he was five and everybody who asked why I might be out of action seemed to know someone who had endured the condition. My father-in-law emailed me some advice based the more brutal surgery he suffered for it forty years ago. He practically wanted to keep me in bed until April.
I asked the surgeon if the first hernia surgeries went back to the days of Rome. He thought not. He didn’t think they would have been bearable without modern anesthesia. As for anyone getting a hernia (20% if my recall is correct) he thought the disorder would simply have killed them all.
Of course, there are a lot more life threatening conditions than hernias that killed off our ancestors but still, knowing that one fifth of the male population could die of hernias is pretty sobering.
For those of you blessedly ignorant of what the damn things are its simply a tear or fault in the muscle walls that hem in our long spaghetti-like guts. The hernia is a protrusion of the intestines through the opening creating an odd bulge under the skin. the surgery pushes the intestines back behind the muscle wall and sews the hole up.
If free-us-from-government-tyranny Republicans and Libertarians get their wish and kill off Medicare many hernia victims without insurance will get to enjoy the resultant utopia by dying a very painful death. It might not be so painful if the Libertarians have their way. They would let plenty of currently illegal drugs loose to ease the pain. However, if its just Republicans who win the debate uninsured hernia sufferers would still die and do so behind bars if they were caught with drugs to relieve their pain…….unless their name happened to be Rush Limbaugh.
