I'll try not to completely hijack bloke's thread, but maybe my experience is relevant for someone. Glad you are recovering well, bloke and just don't do too much [literal] heavy lifting for a while. I had bilateral inguinal hernia surgery at the age of 15 and I'm 75 tomorrow and that surgery has held well all these years. However, my great grandfather, the grain merchant, used to lift heavy sacks of grain and he died on the kitchen table while they were operating on a strangulated hernia...so hernias may well run in my family.
Warning! Long rant about various hernia surgeries ahead: I had an umbilical hernia in my 50's and then I ended up with a freak diaphragmatic hernia in my 60's. This was a hole in my diaphragm about six inches wide. Don't know how I got it, it is often a weight lifters injury or comes about from a severe blow to the abdomen. Don't know how long it was there, as it was misdiagnosed at first when I was way out of breath and had co-occurring anemia. I did let teen agers take shots to my abdomen for fun and I did, without proper preparation, sit down at a squat machine and press 340 lbs, so one of those things might have been responsible...maybe a previous hiatal hernia ripped.
At any rate, in my town, the surgeon assigned was a thoracic surgeon who did mostly hearts all day. I only found out later that surgery for diaphragmatic hernias has only about a 60% success rate. The first surgery let go in 24 hours and was redone in three days. They nicked the lymph membrane that holds (who knew?) the lymph in a reservoir under the diaphragm and had to do another 3 hour surgery to fix that. Eight months later the repair let go again and I had it repaired by the same guy because they told me no one else in town did that surgery. Later a nurse friend told me I should have gone out West to Utah, where the guru of that kind of surgery and his stable of assistants did this stuff all day long. I have a scar that runs from about a foot below the nape of my neck down my spine to my waste and around to the front and down below my belly button. I found out that any time you have a vertical incision in your abdomen, you might have a pop up hernia in your abdominal wall from that weak spot and I have had two repaired since the major surgeries. I now have a third and the docs tell me those can be left alone, but you can't strain and there is pain when the hernia gets out and gets stuck and it is painful to stick it back in. But reversion rates for repair are 30 to 60% for people like myself who are overweight, so I'm losing weight in preparation for having this fixed once and for all, but I still have 40 lbs to go.
Ironically, this injury is what led me to take up the tuba more seriously. I had a tuba as part of my collection of brass instruments, but I took it up because playing the trumpet with all the pressure that entails above the staff became uncomfortable. You move a lot of air with the tuba, but you don't use a lot of pressure. Maybe I'll play trumpet again once this last hernia is fixed. The two previous repairs that didn't hold were done by slicing and stitching muscles and using mesh, but now they tell me the best way to do the repair is to use laproscopy and go inside the peritoneal membrane and unroll some mesh and tack it to the back of said membrane. So you don't have a "cork" of mesh and stitches, you have a cloth spreading any pressure on the repair over a larger area of relatively healthy muscle. Lots to know about hernias, so if you get an abdominal hernia, explore what procedure works best and find a doc who does a lot of them and has a good success rate. There is even a hernia repair risk calculator on line which will tell you your chances of a repair going bad. Best to keep the weight off and maybe not have to deal with a hernia to start with...
Sorry for the rant, but as I say, maybe it will help someone who has read this far.
royjohn, tuba newbie at 75 y/o
