Friday, July 6, 2012

What The Heck Is A Hernia Anyway?

You've heard of them. You might even know people who've had them. But what in the world are they?

To answer that, we first have to understand how our bodies are put together. Picture a hot dog or sausage. If  you've ever seen them get made, you'll know that the meat for them gets put into a casing. The casing helps the hot dog or sausage keep the meat together and give it its shape.

What the casing does for the sausage or hot dog, our body does for us. But unlike hot dogs, humans are vastly more complex, so we tend to have a number of different types of layers keeping our bits in place. The idea, however, is the same.

Now picture a sausage in its casing, then see a pin and watch it make a small hole or tear in it. If you move the sausage around enough, some of the meat inside the casing will wiggle out. That bit of meat or fat that has escaped through the tear or hole in the casing is the hernia.

It's not easy to make out, but the picture above shows a hernia that has formed in the lower right quadrant of the abdomen due to a weakened muscle wall due to a previous surgery. It's not good to leave a hernia like that continue to grow or sit there as they can cause pain, and worse, if it twists and the blood flow to the escaping bits get cut off, it will turn rotten and cause all sorts of problems.

Nowadays, fixing hernias is a lot easier than it used to be. For the problem pictured above, all it took was an out patient laparoscopic surgery. Putting in a scope through a cut in the bellybutton, they can see the exact problem area (and take pics!). With two other small incisions, they push the escaping bits back where they belong then drag in a mesh, which gets stapled to the surrounding area like a patch, to seal it up and put a stop to any further escape attempts by your innards. 

Science is awesome!

Hernias can happen in almost all areas of the torso, from your head to your groin. Which does sound kind of scary! Exercising and staying trim to keep our insides inside sound more important than ever now. :P

(And yes, these are MY insides! Us writerly types must use all that is presented to us for writing fodder. Yes, yes, we must.) Heh heh.


  1. Well ... thanks for the science lesson. Glad everything turned out okay for your hernia.

    1. Thanks! Still recuperating, but made it back to work this week. So progress is being made. :)

  2. Hope you're back on your feet, or soon will be if not. The pictures made me homesick for the pathophysiology class I once took...

    1. Thanks! Working on it. Pathophysiology sounds cool! It amazes me how they make sense out of pictures like the top one. All looks like chopped beef to me. :P