Performing a Hernia Repair Surgery with Mesh

Baptist Health Richmond: Performing a Hernia Repair Surgery with Mesh

Baptist Health offers surgery for inguinal, recurring, and other hernia types. Learn the signs of a hernia and see how specialists perform hernia repair surgery.

Performing a Hernia Repair Surgery with Mesh HealthTalks Transcript

Kent Kessler, MD:
A hernia is defined as a defect in the interior abdominal wall, so it’s really a hole in the fascia, and it allows the organs from the inside to protrude to the outside.

Symptoms of a hernia are bulging, pain and pressure. Hernias tend to get worse with things like heavy lifting or prolonged standing. It tends to increase overtime. and they tend to be relieved with lying down or not exercising.

In general, when a hernia has contents in it, such as fat or bowel especially, then it’s time to go ahead and get that issue fixed.

When you do fix elective hernias, such as inguinal hernias or smaller abdominal wall hernias, you usually will use a piece of mesh, and mesh has been shown to decrease the incidence of a recurrent hernia. It’s an outpatient surgery. The surgery itself doesn’t take very long, say about an hour or so, and you do go home the same day.

Activity levels are pretty much back to normal fairly quickly, except for no heavy lifting for about four to six weeks. But we encourage patients to get home, to do this as an outpatient, to go up and down steps, to bathe, to shower, to get back to some sort of normal diet, and generally, people tolerate it very well.