A few days ago, I noticed a lump down there. Just below my waist.
Actually, it’s not so much a lump. It’s more… a bulge. On the right-hand side of my lower abdomen, right under where my belt goes. A bulge which isn’t normally there. No matter what the circumstances.
I’m immediately thrown into a panic. Have I got cancer too?
I rush to the doctor. He takes one look at my lump-down-there and tells me what I’ve got isn’t life-threatening. In fact, it’s just… shit (not literally. It’s not a poo, stuck where it shouldn’t be).
It’s a hernia.
I’m aghast. The last time I remember anyone talking about a hernia, is when my creepy art teacher told the whole class he had one, during GCSE art.
‘I’m going to be gone for a week,’ said the creepy art teacher, ‘because I need to have an operation… for my hernia.’
He then – to the class’s evident discomfort – went on to talk about his medical condition, at great length and with enormous relish. It was something to do with him tearing his testicular tract, I remember him saying. I have a mental image/memory of the art teacher picking up two smooth pebbles (from a still life) and twirling them around his fingers, as he continued to discuss his balls. I don’t know if this last bit really happened. It might just be a revisionist embellishment.
Anyway, here I am – decades later – with the same medical condition as that creepy, old fellow. Now I have an internal tear, somewhere down there. How has it come to this?
‘Is it because I’m always lifting heavy objects?’ I ask the doctor hopefully. This would certainly be a silver-lining to the situation. Lizzie is endlessly making me move beds, bookcases or wardrobes about the house – usually up staircases. It’s a compulsion of hers, to keep on moving things up and down floors… like we’re in a complex 3D chess game using home furniture, the rules of which are only known to Lizzie.
Now that I have a hernia, maybe I won’t have to move furniture around anymore! I say to myself, hopefully. Woo hoo!
‘It probably isn’t because you’ve been lifting heavy objects,’ says the doctor, immediately pissing on my parade.
Dammit.
‘It’s more likely to do with your age,’ continues the doctor, remorselessly.
Oh my God, I think. This is getting even worse!
An hour later, I get home and tell Lizzie the news. The bulge down there is a hernia! It’s almost certainly to do with lifting heavy objects! (I lie). If I don’t have an operation – soon – it will get even worse and more bulgy!
‘Oh no!’ says Lizzie. ‘Does it actually hurt?’
She’s asked me this before… and the answer is the same now as it was then.
‘Er, no it doesn’t,’ I admit, sheepishly. ‘It actually feels completely fine.’
‘Oh well… you poor thing,’ says Lizzie, noncommittally, then makes herself a green tea.
Dammit! I think. Before Lizzie got properly ill, I could have really milked this hernia thing. I could have tried to get some proper sympathy out of the family, because of it. Maybe they would have brought me cups of tea in bed and stuff like that!
But now… none of that’s going to happen. In the scheme of things, with everything which has been happening to Lizzie and our family, who gives a fuck about a hernia?
There’s only one thing for it. I decide not to give a fuck about my hernia either. I’ll have the operation, maybe miss a couple of days work, and that’ll be that.
I’m lucky it’s nothing more serious.
And, with that thought, I make myself a cup of tea too.
P. D. Clifton 
Leave a comment