Learning a New Word

By Bobby Neal Winters

Every morning, and I mean every morning, I spend some quality time with Duolingo working on my Spanish.  Lately, I’ve been working on Latin, French, and Italian too, all after my morning Wordle game. It helps me get my brain started since my doctor took me off coffee.

Anyway, I like words and I fancy that I have a good vocabulary, but this week I learned a new word and not from either Wordle or Duolingo.  That word is “inguinal.” 

The doctors and nurses who are reading this already know where this is heading.  That is because ‘inguinal” is an adjective used to identify different kinds of hernias, and it is the kind of hernia that I’ve just discovered that I have.

In my family, the word we used to refer to inguinal hernia was simply “hernia.” My dad had a hernia; my grandfather had a hernia; my great grandfather had had a hernia.  There is probably a string of these that goes back to someone in a tribe exiting sub saharan Africa, tens of thousands of years ago.

For those of you who are luckily innocent of all this, an inguinal hernia is a place where the muscle in the abdominal cavity has given way and allows the large intestines to bulge through.  I saw a bulge; I went to my doctor; he sent me to a surgeon; the surgeon has set up an appointment.

This provides an interesting setting to talk about progress in medical science.  

I mentioned my great grandfather.  He’d had a hernia. In his day, he just let it go.  I suppose he may have dealt with it by laying down and letting his intestines roll back into his body or giving them a little help. He may have had a truss which is a device I will discuss later. But for him surgery was not really an option.

His hernia eventually became strangulated.  That is to say, it got stuck in his abominable wall and the blood supply got cut off.  In his case, the intestine became gangrenous and he died in agony.

Here we come to the device I mentioned earlier: the truss.  The truss is a device designed to push your intestines back into your abdomen where they belong.  Both my grandfather and my father had them.  My brother and I used to find them in grandpa and dad’s respective rooms among their clothing and play with them.  We thought they were just a different kind of clothing that you wore when you grew up.  

We were told, to stop playing with them we would be wearing our own soon enough.

My grandfather was able to use a truss and get by with that and being careful.  He avoided dying in agony of a gangrenous strangulated hernia.  The bar for success was set realistically in my family.

Dad had had surgery twice to repair his hernia.  The first time in 1945 and the second in the late 1970s. 

I can be exact about the first because that was when Dad was drafted into the war.  In a story he told with some frequency, they diagnosed his hernia when he took his physical: the old cliche “turn your head and cough.”

At that time, in his words, “They did not let my feet touch the ground for a month.”  Recovery was brutal.  Because of this, when the hernia recurred, he just got himself a truss, and put off surgery as long as he could: the late 1970s.

When his surgery was done then, he was operated on in the morning and was walking around the hospital halls that afternoon.

Press fast-forward 50 years.  

We now have laparoscopic surgery.  You go in in the morning, make small incisions, and operate through small pieces of pipe while looking at everything through cameras on TV screens like a video game.  Then you go home that very same day.

It’s like medicine has learned something in the last 80 years.

So I am going to have some downtime, but not too far down or for too long.  I will still be able to do Wordle, Duolingo, and to write.  And now I know a new word.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )