My Hernia Story

It began on a flight from California back to my home on Kaua'i, New Years Eve, last day of 2014. I had a very busy schedule on the mainland and the night before the flight I didn’t sleep well; I was tired! Getting into my seat for the flight, I started to feel a pain in my groin area, guys would recognize it as blue balls, but this was more intense. As the flight progressed, the pain got worse. I tried standing up and bouncing a bit and moved around the plane but it didn’t help. In my seat, I squirmed around to find a comfortable position, but couldn’t find a way to ease the discomfort. It was a looooooong flight!

When I finally arrived on the island, I guess the mental distraction shifted my focus, because I don’t remember having any pain on the car ride home. After unpacking my things, my son asked me to go jumping on the trampoline. Why not? 

Laughing with my son and goofing around, I was doing some light bouncing but after a few minutes I decided it was time to do a big jump. When I landed, I felt something happen to my lower abdomen on my left side. It wasn’t an excruciating pain, but I was hurting. 

I got off the trampoline and pulled my shirt up to check it out and that is when my mind kinda freaked out.... I saw a golf ball sized bulge. 

I had heard of hernias but I didn’t think it would happen to me.

I’m careful when I lift stuff up, exercise regularly and I’m in good shape. Yet looking down I recognized that it really couldn’t be anything else. Then my mind started to panic…

I wasn’t going to be able to play!

How big of a deal is that?

Well, I was known on Kaua’i as the Ambassador of Play. Although I love playing sports, above and beyond any other form of exercise, I have a passion bordering on obsession with kicking around one of my HACKiDOs™. Requiring pretty extraordinary movement and control to kick this little thing around, it was dawning on me that I was going to be benched for quite some time; this was NOT good!

This was one of those moments where I was praying it wasn’t true, that I could somehow rewind and do over that decision to jump on the trampoline.

Of course that was not possible and if it wasn’t the trampoline, it would have happened with something else. 

I was going down a spiral of negative thoughts, but at the time I didn’t realize that it would turn out to be one of my greatest gifts.

After the mental onslaught, I started to calm down and form a plan of action.

First step, go see my friend who happens to be a kickass doctor. Yes, it was indeed a hernia. Either I could get the surgery done, or just live with it if the pain wasn’t too bad. Okay, yeah, the pain wasn’t unbearable, but I definitely couldn’t play hack anymore, walking was even uncomfortable. I tried wearing a truss, but I found it also uncomfortable and very inconvenient.

I did some research on surgery, which I was already very apprehensive about. I didn’t want to go under the knife, especially on Kaua’i. The local hospital is notorious for having those little bleach resistant super bacteria that wanna infiltrate your body; the infection rate is pretty astronomical. When I started researching the complications from getting a mesh inserted, I was shocked. Why did they even perform this surgery with all of the negative side effects and the pretty high possibility of needing a second, more extensive and invasive surgery. All of these complications and issues trump the hernia itself. Check out my section on surgery risks in my Hernia 101 page for more details...

So I started diving into alternative options to the destructive mesh surgery.

Looking towards the mainland, I couldn’t find anywhere that had alternative options. I was settling on one in Canada that would use a steel thread instead of the mesh, although I wasn’t too stoked with the idea. Then I was recommended to look into a doctor in Italy who performed a "less invasive" surgery that uses your own tissue that would eventually be absorbed by your body verses being rejected. As this seemed like the best option I could find, I made plans to fly to Europe, visit family in neighboring countries… have some fresh gelato!

As fate would have it, I couldn’t make the trip for personal reasons… what do I do now? I decided to forge my own path. I gave myself 3 months to get my hernia under control. I figured if I could be back in action in 6 months, it would be worth it. If I failed, I could always get the surgery later on. I have had extensive training in the way our bodies work and I knew I needed to go all in. This knowledge brought me to the conclusion that I needed to tackle this in three ways; internally, externally and mentally.

Check out my list of the main actions I took in my Remedies page.

I scoffed at nay sayers. Every morning I woke up with the attitude that I can do this. As a boy my dad would wake me up almost every morning with, “Today is going to be a great day” and I would repeat this mantra when I got out of bed during this healing journey. Every step of the way I reflected on what I had accomplished, met my goals, and pumped myself up.

And in two weeks, my hernia went back inside… and it stayed there.

It would be inaccurate to say I couldn’t believe it, because I could believe it… in fact, it was the only thing I was focusing on. I also instinctively knew that this time was critical for me. If I jumped back into an activity that pushed the hernia out again, not only would it hurt my physical body, my mental state would be dealt a heavy blow. So I still took it easy, ate the same diet and slowly increased the intensity of my exercises.

After another two weeks I decided that I should try to kick around a HACKiDO™, again with focused attention to my body awareness and not pushing myself. 

I was playing again!

It is hard to express in words what that felt like… I DID IT!

zander phelps kauai rainbow ultimate disc

Your Body Is A Miracle - Work With It!

Staying on track with my protocol, it took another month of gentle play before I got back into my most physically demanding exercise at the time, Ultimate Disc. Running around on the field it was hard to believe that only a couple of months before I was basically bedridden.

After the hernia felt secure and in place, I continued with monitoring my nutrition intake for a few more months, although chips got back in the diet pretty quickly! The exercises kind of dropped off in favor of more physical work outs after the third month. I continued the vacuum breath mostly for entertainment purposes.

The fact that I was able to achieve something powerful that I put my mind to and took action on deepened my sense of confidence and improved my mental state.

Check out my 30-day protocol to get trained with all my treatments and recommendations based on what worked for me.

Check Out the 30-Day Protocol

YOU CAN OWN YOUR OWN HEALING!

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Although this wasn’t an instant fix, it was amazingly quick, much quicker than I had anticipated.  Plus, although I wasn’t 100% positive at the time, it turned out to be a long-term solution. The hernia forced me to focus my attention into healing, and I learned more about my body and myself than I had in the prior 45 years of my life.

I want you to succeed!  Not only does it give you a huge boost to your awareness and confidence about your body, but it also encourages others to know that they can do it for themselves.  Hernias are more common than I knew.  The more of us who can heal ourselves the better!

If you're ready to jump all in and own your own healing, The 30-Day Protocol offers an effective toolkit of training and tracking.  I encourage you to check it out and see if it's right for you.   

- Zander Phelps, your Heal My Hernia™ Coach

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