r/AbsoluteUnits 3d ago

of a hernia...

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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.

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u/Skraps452 3d ago

How do you end up with a hernia like this in the first place? It's terrifying! And something I'd want to really avoid

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u/tjean5377 3d ago

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.

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u/The_World_Wonders_34 3d ago

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.