Read time: 5 min.

One of my friends moved into a house that required significant renovations last summer. It was no place for her pet tortoise, so I offered to let Sheldon stay with me. How hard could it be to take care of a tortoise? Surely, the toughest part would be shoving Sheldon’s 250-pound terrarium up the stairs by myself. Pop! Oof. It was.

After emptying the terrarium of its tortoise and his habitat, I managed to slide the enclosure -four feet long with lawn pavers in the bottom and 3/4-inch tempered glass walls- up two-thirds of the stairs leading to my apartment. That’s when I felt the pop and lost my grip. Sheldon’s home rocketed towards me like a battering ram, and the impact cracked two ribs. The strain tore the labrum in my left shoulder.

Also, the initial pop shoved my guts through my abdominal wall, and an umbilical hernia was the diagnosis. Between it and my cracked ribs, it really hurt to cough! Everything else eventually healed, but the hernia kept getting bigger. It’s become enough of a painful issue that I’ll be at the hospital today to get it fixed.

I’m no stranger to minor self-surgery. Years ago, I occasionally had to perform it as a temp without health insurance. A tooth cracked, so I filled it myself. When the filling failed, I pulled the tooth. Out at the pond, I sewed nasty gashes to my arm and leg back up with fishing line and a barbed hook I bent back. Severing the nerve of my left ring finger with a butcher knife was an honest mistake, but I stanched the bleeding, ate a popsicle, and splinted it with the little wooden stick.

Despite those amateur successes, I’m not a doctor, and I’m glad this procedure is in the hands of a professional! It will take place at Ascension St. Vincent in Anderson, long known as St. John’s Hospital. The institution was founded in 1894, when philanthropist John Hickey donated his ten-acre farm to the Sisters of the Holy Cross¹. The sisters renovated Hickey’s home and cared for eighty patients the following year². In its early days, the hospital was known as St. Mary’s³.

St. John’s has expanded and expanded over the years. A twenty-room patient wing was added in 1914⁴, and a $500,000, six-story addition primarily funded by General Motors opened in 1943⁵. Fifteen years later, the hospital expanded again in a $350,000 project that added a modern cafeteria and eighteen more patient rooms⁶.

Officials broke ground on a $6 million, seven-story wing that replaced the original hospital building in 1965. The expansion increased the facility’s capacity to more than 340 patients⁷! Other projects have followed over the years and, today, the hospital -known as St. Vincent since 2013 and Ascension St. Vincent since 2019- sprawls across four city blocks.

Unfortunately, my operation won’t happen in a cool old part of the hospital. That’s alright with me since I’ll be knocked out for it! Even though it’s an outpatient procedure, hernia repair is considered major surgery, and it’ll be my first under general anesthesia since a pair of lithotripsies I underwent years ago. That’s where a doctor bombards a kidney stone with ultrasonic waves to break it up.

I’m sure the surgery will go smoothly, but the procedure I’m undergoing is an “umbilectomy with hernia repair.” If I’ve read everything right, I expect to emerge from Ascension St. Vincent without a belly button! That’s fine by me: it’s not pierced, and it’s probably better to have one fewer hole to jam my forefinger down. As a people, we’re not meant to know how far it goes anyway.

I could never have predicted that an offhand suggestion to foster a tortoise would lead to the loss of my belly button, but that’s how the Sheldon saga played out. Here was here for seven uneventful months, and I kind of miss him.

I won’t miss the hernia. Although I’m attached to it now, I’m pretty sure I won’t have any nostalgia for my navel either. If I find myself pining for a tortoise again, I’ve still got a two-hundred-and-fifty pound terrarium on a shelf in my living room. I’m certainly never moving the damn thing again!

Sources Cited
1 Moyer, T. (2014, June 9). Hospital celebrates 120 years of service. The Anderson Herald-Bulletin. Web. Retrieved July 26, 2023.
2 Schneider, J. (2007, December 30). Two hospitals are a hallmark of Anderson. The Anderson Herald-Bulletin. Web. Retrieved July 26, 2023.
3 St. Mary’s Hospital, Anderson, Ind. (2008). Picturing Madison County. Anderson Public Library. Indiana Memory.  Web. Retrieved July 26, 2023.
4 Lay Cornerstone For Hospital Addition (1914, September 10). The Anderson Herald. p. 1.
5 Dedicate New Wing At St. John’s Today (1943, December 19). The Anderson Herald. Pp. 1, 8.
6 Hospital Addition Erected (1958, April 17). The Anderson Daily Bulletin. p. 1.
7 St. John’s Holds Groundbreaking Today At 4 p.m. (1965, August 19). The Anderson Herald. p. 1.