Read time: 4 min.

I can’t believe it, but four months have passed since I had surgery to fix an umbilical hernia. It’s been two months since I provided an update, but it looks like Episode 7 is the final chapter. Thank Goodness!

Here’s a quick refresher to my stupid situation: two summers ago, I let Sheldon the Tortoise live in my house to help a friend out. Sheldon came with a glass terrarium that weighed more than two hundred pounds, and I moved it up the stairs by myself. That’s a recipe for a hernia, and mine got bigger and bigger. A year later, back in July, I had surgery to repair it. The initial recovery was smooth, but the rest became a protracted hassle. You can read the entire saga here, if you’d like.

Last I checked in, my time at a wound care clinic was ending. I’d met with my surgeon again, and he said that packing the wound like the clinic advised was damaging the new tissue filling it in. The clinic was focused on drawing exudate up from the deepest parts of the hole, but my surgeon decided to address what was causing it in the first place.

To that end, he advised us to pour a shot of hydrogen peroxide in the wound three times a day. It sounds counterintuitive, but hydrogen peroxide is more effective at promoting tissue granulation than the saline we’d been using. My mom had been helping me throughout the ordeal, and we switched to the new regimen.

Sure enough, the hole kept getting smaller. The worrisome tunnel near two o’clock closed up, and the wound scabbed over. I was ecstatic when I called the surgeon to cancel our follow-up! Another surgery to reopen my abdomen and remove the mesh would have been necessary if it hadn’t healed. I’d have had to start from zero. 

I attribute much of the progress to cutting back on smoking. I haven’t had a pipe since before my surgery, and I’ve cut down to three cigarettes per day. I’ve asked myself why I still need three cigarettes, but I haven’t come up with a logical answer yet.

At any rate, my wound care doctor told me it’d help a lot to quit, but my surgeon said vaping was as good an alternative as any. I’ve dabbled in e-cigarettes, e-pipes, and vapes over the years, but finally found a brand that lets me hit it without coughing my guts out. That’s an important consideration after hernia repair!

I started treating the wound less frequently over time since there wasn’t much to treat, but I kept checking in with Mom every other day for a second set of eyes to track any changes I might have missed! She became concerned about how it was scabbing up, so I called my surgeon. I couldn’t get in touch with him, again, so I called my doctor. 

My doctor got me in right away and said that the wound was healing just fine. He attributed the scabbing to psoriasis, which can be exacerbated by surgical trauma. That was a couple weeks ago, and it’s only continued to improve. I’m happy to say I’m finally out of the woods.

Hernia repair is supposed to be a pretty minor operation. It was, but healing turned out to be another story altogether. I’m grateful for all the help and well-wishes I received over the past four months, but I’m ecstatic to put the affair behind me. I finally feel back to normal, and it’s nice to not walk around looking like King Hippo from Punch-Out! every day! 

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