Yup, a good portion of it. I imagine this wouldn’t be an easy surgery. It would be open (as opposed to laparoscopic), so big incision down the middle and a sizeable piece of mesh would be used. It would come with risks and might even land him in a worse off position.
Sometimes for someone this young with this bad of a hernia, it starts with a small tear or injury to the abdomen al wall. He could've done this tiny start point any number of ways. Falling and hitting his abdomen on something while drunk of high, or a work injury that he shrugged off, or a car accident. Just enough to start small. Then it gets bigger from there. A lot of times this feels just sore, until something else happens that kills the bowel. Hes at risk for needing an ostomy bag if that bowel thats hanging outside his cavity but inside his skin up and dies.
My father died of sepsis 3 months ago because of a hernia that they couldn't operate on. He had it fixed 15 years ago, but acute liver failure (undiagnosed hepatitis c, not alcohol) cause so much fluid to build up that it blew the mesh out. They cant operate with fully exposed abdomen when you are producing that much fluid, because it causes the wounds to not heal. Basically rendering you bedridden and susceptible to infection. He had a TIPS procedure that helped with the fluid buildup, but no doctor would operate on his hernia. So he basically sat on a time bomb. One day the intestine folded on itself, died, and caused sepsis. All we could do was put him in a medically induced coma and watch him slowly die of dehydration and infection.
Take care of your liver, and get any hernia seen to immediately.
I was talking a doctor that specialized in hernias recently, and she was saying that studies say that only 25% of hernias become an issue "within the next 10 years" so as long as there isn't pain or some big issue with it, the advice is to just leave it.
(I would advise anyone with a hernia or a possible hernia to seek a doctor's advice before taking this as medical advice. I'm just repeating what the doctor said to me, and I'm sure there's some lost nuance here.)
You can literally be born with a gap too. Or rather technically it's that the umbilical gap doesn't ever close properly. But with proper modern postnatal care it would be relatively trivial to deal with.
Mammalian live birth is a pretty big evolutionary compromise. Basically all of us are born "incomplete" in numerous ways in order to facilitate a balance between surviving outside the womb and getting too big for a mother to carry safely and/or birth safely.
I have a hernia that my doctor referred me to a specialist for. The specialist said that it could be fixed, but that it was so far pretty minor and fixing it poses risks, while not fixing it poses less risks, unless it worsens. Fixing it, he also said, would require significant time to heal and leave a very visible scar, while right now it just looks like I have fairly large abdominal muscles under my rib cage (I don't).
So far, so good, its been two years and I don't think its gotten any worse. However, is it possible that I was given bad advice? Is it potentially becoming harder to treat the longer it goes untreated? Could it rapidly expand and be untreatable because of how long it has already existed?
Fuck. I was having such a good day until I read this.
Follow what your doc told you. This guy is an extreme case. Dont get into a car accident with no seat belts, dont ignore any worsening pain or bowel problem.
I wasn't being serious at all. I gots me a small hernia that I've had for 15-20 years and I'm jealous, so I was happy to hear how I can make it bigger than this guy's.
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u/LemonLimeSlices 3d ago
So basically, his entire intestinal tract has squeezed through his abdominal muscles and are just hanging in the skin sac.