Distended Processus Vaginalis

Okay, so it was once in 1987, at the age of 23, when I went black in the eyes at work with severe pain in my lower abdomen and was taken to hospital.

To start with this story, I weighed a maximum of 60 kg at that time and was 189 cm tall. Since childhood, for as long as I could remember, I had felt nauseous after every meal, sometimes even after drinking, and my lower abdomen then presented a hard, prominent part, more on this later.

Below are two pictures from that year, and another picture behind it on a beach a few months after the surgical remedy.

In any case, nobody was interested in that or anything else, neither in childhood nor in adolescence, because I had already literally switched off my body due to the other deficits and nobody would see me looking sad in children’s pictures.

In any case, everything was examined internally in the clinic for three weeks, which is all done off the peg, but I could only stand in front of the bed in pain during the worst episodes.

One day, two nurses – that’s what they were called back then – laughed when they looked at my medical records because they even did a pregnancy test with me.

At some point, when the psycho drawer had already been opened, a surgeon came by again and was surprised at the very soft groin with a very high sensitivity to pressure.

The decision was then actually made, in consultation with me of course, to “open up” on suspicion.

My first words after waking up after the procedure under general anaesthetic were: “The pressure is gone”.

Later, the head of general surgery came in and had to smile, saying:

“We found something we hadn’t expected and we wonder how something like this can be walked around with for so long”.

It was a large open processus vaginalis measuring 11 × 1 cm.

This was the hernial orifice, which was blindly closed distally, and the bowel was repeatedly displaced into this orifice, the latter was not yet necrotic.

The anatomy as a whole was described as irregular.

After that first operation, I was able to eat without pain for the first time in my consciously perceived life – an indescribable feeling – and then quickly reached a more normal weight.

Later, I met the head of the internal medicine department in the stairwell, who apologised to me for the pain I had presumably suffered because of the marathon diagnostics.

He then said that I had been a bit of a sensation at the hospital.

I had always had an incomplete cryptorchidism, and later a hydrocele was also found on the left side.

During the sixth operation in this region of the body, everything was revised bilaterally and the undescended testicle was removed.

This was done on an outpatient basis by a urologist who was very familiar with this kind of thing in small children and treated it in the same way as small children because, as in my case, it is done at around one year of age, which was only finally the case for me 28 years later and I have never had any problems with it since …😜