Hernia Surgery

Hernia surgery

        Hernia is the sliding of a part of your abdominal cavity (your upper stomach, your lower bowel) into some other area of your body, connected to your abdomen by some sort of canal. When the muscles that hold the canal loosen enough for the sac of fatty tissue to pass right through, your hernia has developed completely. There are many kinds of hernia (hiatal, umbilical or abdominal) and one of the most important characteristic of this condition is that it can be reversible or irreversible. If the hernia is reversible, it is called a sliding hernia and it can be gently pushed back into the abdomen, without requiring any kind of hernia surgery. However, if it is irreversible or strangulated, causing severe problems to your digestive system, it has to be repaired. The only way to repair a hernia is through hernia surgery.

       Hernia surgery is not exactly a complicated or dangerous procedure. However, that does not mean that it should be taken lightly or that it should be agreed with unless you completely understand what is going to happen to your body. Basically, your surgeon is going to try and fix your loosened muscles. Of course, he or she will push the sac of fatty tissue and internal organs back into your abdomen, but the main goal is to avoid a recurrence from the hernia.

       There are several procedures that are known as hernia surgery, depending on the type of hernia they have to fix. Nonetheless, in a typical procedure, there exists a strictly followed succession of steps:

• Anesthesia: previous to the hernia surgery, the anesthesiologist will interview the patient and read their medical files, making sure that the anesthetic used on that person does not do more harm than good. Then, the specialist will calculate the exact amount of anesthetic needed and he or she will personally inject it to the patient. More so, the anesthesiologist does not, under any circumstances, leave the operating room, monitoring constantly the vital signs of the sufferer.
• Sterilization of the surgical site: naturally, on your skin grows bacteria. All of those pathogen agents must be removed before perforating your skin with anything, even a needle. This is why the surgical site is sterilized before hernia surgery.
• The surgery itself: the surgeon will perform a perfectly straight incision on top of the hernia site, through the skin and the several layers beneath it until it reaches the troublesome bag of fatty tissue. The purpose is to neatly separate the bulge from the surrounding healthy tissue and to repair whatever damage was done to the canal and the muscles. After all this is accomplished, the surgeon will close the hole and tighten the muscles around it both with some sutures and a plastic mesh (a biologically compatible plastic, of course).
• The closing of the cut: it is usually done with some absorbable sutures, so as to not over - stress the patient with the removal of these sutures.

The dangers of hernia surgery

        Any kind of surgery implies some sort of danger to your life. Basically, anything and everything could go wrong: from being allergic to all known anesthetics to your heart stopping in the middle of the surgery. You could get infected with some sort of hospital bacteria, resistant to antibiotics, which would cause you a lot of problems.

        However, in the case of hernia surgery, the dangers mainly refer to your insides and the way the surgeon repairs your muscles: if the inner sutures are too tight or the muscles too damaged, there is a very good probability that your hernia will make a reappearance quite soon. On the other hand, if the mesh that the surgeon inserts is not perfectly sterile or carefully placed, it could get caught in your intestines and infect them, leading to septic shock and even to death.

Laparoscopic hernia surgery

       Developed in recent years as a less dangerous version of the classic hernia surgery, the laparoscopic procedure is quite complicated: the surgeon makes several small incisions next to the hernia site and inserts a tube that has a camera at the very end of it, using it to see inside your abdominal cavity without cutting you open completely. Through another of these small holes, the medic inserts the mesh that should protect your inner abdomen from further damage.

       This method is used only in patients that have had classical hernia surgery several times, but the condition has reappeared. One advantage of laparoscopic hernia surgery is that is greatly reduces the post - surgical pain and discomfort.