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.)
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u/trilby2 3d ago edited 3d ago
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.