I blogged a while back, complaining that I had a hernia.  It's large.  It visibly protrudes from my abdomen.  It's to my right, in the corner of the triangle that pubic hair makes.  I've been trying to get surgery since the middle of December.  But due to our "greatest healthcare system on Earth", I've had to get multiple referrals, had to wait for appointments, and generally get fucked around.  I was scheduled to get my surgery March 24th.

With my new, wild and crazy lifestyle, having a bulge of intestine trying to escape my abdomen has been a liability.  This one is a little lower and in the center than mine, on the other side of the body, and on somebody not nearly so sexy as I, but you get the idea:

Lovely, right?

My wife is a director at a hospital here in Vegas.  She used her pull as a risk manager to try to get me surgery sooner.  She got a badass surgeon to agree to do my surgery this Monday, the seventh.  I went in for a consultation yesterday.

Turns out I don't have a hernia at all.  I have three.  The large, protruding loop of intestine in my abdomen is from being thrown by a horse last year.  The saddle horn, propelled by a bucking horse, stabbed into my body.  The saddle horn, although leaving my skin unbroken, blasted through the girdle of muscle that holds my guts in place.  Apparently, this was done with so much force, that the pressure change inside my abdomen blew my intestines out of two other convenient avenues.  One through my inguinal canal (where infant boys have their testicles descend) and another through the tunnel of epitheleal tissue that surrounds my femoral artery.

Here's a picture of the "indirect inguinal" hernia:

MMMM.... tastey.  It points downward, towards my scrotum, so you can't really notice it externally.  I can feel it though.  I thought it was a secondary effect from the grotesque bulging hernia I had.  But no.  This one is entirely seperate and on my left side.

The one that worries me most is the "little hernia" I have pressing on my femoral artery.  I won't post a picture, because to the layman, it looks a lot like the one above.  I can feel my pulse in this hernia... all the fucking time.  I was up at 3:30am today because the insesant "tap, tap, tap, tap" about 60-70 times a minute in my groin has become unignorable.

My surgery on Monday is not going to happen.  I've gone from a 45 minute, laproscopic surgery to a three hour long, cut him open like a fish surgery.  My recovery is going to be so bad, that they're going to install several pumps that dispense local anesthetic to the surgery location for three days after the surgery.  I'm going to get two on the right and one on the left: 

You clip that medicine filled globe onto your clothes and the narrow end is a catheder that they suture the incision up around.  It slowly dribbles a novacaine like solution (it's Marcaine) onto where they install the patch/plug/patch assembly to fix the rip in my muscle wall.  After three days, the medicine is gone, you pull the catheder out yourself, and throw the whole thing out in the trash.  Between that and the Percodan, I should be able to keep my pain under control.

Now my surgery is on March 16th.  The doctor has told me I'm not even supposed to carry groceries in from the car.  I'm not even supposed to walk up stairs quickly.  I asked the doctor about vigorous sexual activity (we're supposed to go to Red Rooster with my wife's co-worker and her crazy, sex machine Persian boyfriend).  The doctor said "How vigorous?" 

I had to remember that my wife kind of works with this guy.  "Well... Pretty damn vigorous."

The doctor shook his head and said that he's surprised that I'm having sex at all.  One hernia is restricting blood flow to my junk.  Another one is pressing on the plumbing that goes to and from my left nut.  The big one just bulges out and hurts when I exert myself. 

He told me to "take it easy" and that I shouldn't do anything that causes me pain. 

When I'm "in the zone" fucking, you could stab me through the heart and I wouldn't notice until after I was done.  How the fuck am I supposed to know if it's causing me pain?  I'm still fucking going this Saturday.  Between the dancing and sexual gymnastics, I know I'm fucking up.  How embarrassing would it be to blow your intestines out of your abdomen while you're having group sex?  I'll let you know...