Fifteenth post-op day and a conversation with my surgeon.

Tags

Inguinal hernia recovery, Inguinal hernia surgery, Inguinal hernia surgery pain, Personal experience inguinal hernia

This morning was the two-week followup conversation with my inguinal hernia surgeon. He checked the incision, the tapes, the swelling and felt for any hernia when I coughed. Everything was as near perfect as we could hope for, and he was a little surprised that I hadn’t used any of the pain pills he prescribed for me, or that I claimed that I never needed them. I said that I would rather feel a little tolerable pain when I did something that irritated the surgery site and then I wouldn’t do that action again. If I were on pain-suppressing medications I might do things that were counterproductive to the wound’s healing.

The only external method of pain suppression was placing an ice pack on the surgery site with a layer of cloth to slow the heat transfer from ice to skin, but I wasn’t thinking of it as pain suppression but as a swelling control. Even two weeks after the surgery there is still swelling a half-inch high and one inch wide along the cut, but there is no pain even when I poke it moderately with my finger tip. One easy tip to follow before any surgery is to purchase some oral anesthetic spray like Chloraseptic and keep it with you at all times. When you are about to cough or sneeze, spray a little on the tickling spot and maybe you won’t cough. When you have incisions they will really hurt when you cough.

I feel okay today but my inguinal hernia surgeon said to expect to feel tired for several more weeks while the healing is taking place.

Today’s medical ducks aren’t so friendly

Tags

Inguinal hernia pain, Inguinal hernia recovery, Inguinal hernia surgery

Yesterday morning I had an inguinal hernia operation and for the next few days to maybe six weeks I will be invalid. I tried and succeeded in doing my usual easy things, like visiting with my old dudes down at the Commons coffee shop. But when I got home, I was still tired from yesterday’s super early rising and the trauma of being cut open, patched up and then sewn back together.

Unfortunately, my roof troubles were still in force and so as delicately as I possibly could I went up the ladder to the top and shoveled snow, chopped ice, and then sprinkled an ice melting compound along the edges where the ice had formed an eighteen-inch tapering ridge. I think this will get me through the winter snow season if we don’t get more than a couple of inches at a time. Some portions of the roof still have more than two feet of soggy snow on them but I have cleared off what appear to be the less supported parts. The electricity-generating solar panels on the roof are working well after the snow was mostly scraped off; they are very black and will melt thin snow coverings quickly in full sunshine.

Back to me! After that hour of roof work, I went back to bed. My caution about not exerting myself left me physically feeling okay, but tired, so I got back in bed. My surgery doesn’t hurt much except when I am in certain postures that put tension on my abdomen. It is especially difficult to sit down and get up from sitting because those muscles pull really hard for a second or so. I’ve worked out a method for sitting down where I put my heels well under the chair and then squat straight down and when my hands can reach the chair, or arms of the chair, I transfer as much of my weight to them as possible and lower myself the rest of the way. I do this slowly taking about fifteen seconds, which allows my stomach muscles time to adapt without much pain. 

I’m not enthusiastic about surgery, but a friend of mine’s father, who refused to see a doctor, died from an inguinal hernia which strangled his intestine.

I think a few days of annoyance is better than a week of intense pain and then dying.