My Hernia

I've been meaning to write about this for quite some time. It's pretty funny to have had a hernia when you were only 16, and my experience was fairly awkward... so here's a story about my very first hernia.

So, like I said, I was 16 years old. One night I was laying in bed feeling my balls, which is nothing out of the ordinary - especially for a teenager. As I began to juggle them around I noticed 1... 2... 3... wait, 3!?! I double checked, then I triple checked, and yelled, "MOMMMM!" She came into my room and asked what was up, to which I replied, "um, I have 3 balls." "Derek! are you serious?! Let me see!" "NO, MOM! I need to go to the doctor."

So the next day I go to the doctor to find out that I had an inguinal hernia, which is when your intestines push through a weak spot in the muscle wall of your groin area. Usually this just creates a lump or bulge somewhere around your lower abdomen, but not mine. Mine ended up right in my nuts. This is only solved by a surgical procedure where they go in, push your intestines back and fix up that wall that it slipped through.

The funniest thing about mine - aside from having 3 testicles - was that I could push my intestine back inside the hole that it fell through. So I had this fun little game where I could go from 3 balls to 2 and back to 3 again. Yeah, it sounds gross, but it was awesome. Too bad I didn't have a girlfriend or anything to show my sweet trick to - and none of my homophobic friends wanted to see it... So, I just did it in my spare time.

Alright, back to the doctor visit. While at the office, the doctor checked me out then let my mom back in to discuss what my situation was. She's obviously curious and is wondering how I got this hernia. So the doctor explained that it's usually from some kind of strain, whether it's lifting something heavy, pooping real hard, whatever. No one really knows what mine was from. So my mom was trying to figure out where this hernia came from. And she said to the doctor, "Well, Derek and his friends hit each other in the balls with 7 pound bags of sausage. Would that cause this?" The doctor obviously replied, "Ummm, no. That would not cause this."

And because I know you're all curious about this sausage thing... I guess I better explain her question. I worked at a pizza place called Riverbend Pizza. At Riverbend, we kept bags of sausage in a cooler beneath the pizza making table. So when you ran out of sausage and someone was standing there making a pizza, it was completely routine to pull the bag of sausage out of the cooler and rack your fellow coworker in the nuts. It was a horrible game, but it did not squeeze my intestines into my nutbag.

So anyway, we had to schedule a surgery. However, this hernia business happened just a couple days before we were to leave for a Caribbean cruise, so we did the smart thing and went on that cruise with my 3 testicles.

After the cruise I had my surgery. I went in, got put under, and woke up to 3 attractive nurses lifting up my surgery gown and totally checking out my junk. And believe me when I say that it was COLD in that surgery room. It was embarrassing, but not being completely off the anesthesia, I passed right back out before I could do anything to stop those nurses.

Surgery was pretty easy and recovery simply meant no lifting anything heavy for a couple weeks. The part that was weird was that I woke up without any pubes. The incision was about a 6 inch horizontal cut near my waistline. So they shaved the entire area and applied the biggest piece of tape they could find - you know, just to keep the incision from ripping open. It was no big deal until I realized that this tape had to come off sometime.

So two and a half weeks later, I was scheduled for my follow up visit. Think about that. Two and a half weeks is plenty of time for the return of pubic hair. So I went in, the doctor told me it was time to take the tape off and said that, "this is probably going to be the worst part of the entire process." He was right.

So that is pretty much the end of my hernia story...

Except for the pimple that kept appearing at the right end of my scar. It was no big deal really - just odd that a pimple kept happening there. Four years after my surgery, my junior year at Cornell College, this pimple got much bigger than normal. It was pretty gross. It got giant and white. So I popped it and out flew a piece of white rubber about the size of a BB. I mean it shot about 3 feet out of me, haha. I have no idea wtf it was. But I can only assume it's something that got dropped into my body during the surgery and my body was trying to reject it for four years, haha. I haven't gotten a pimple there since.

And THAT is (hopefully) the end of my hernia story.