A hernia, is a protrusion of one organ through it into another part of the body where it shouldn’t be. And so there are lots of places that you can get a hernia.
You can get an umbilical hernia in, for example in a baby where the bowel pokes through into the umbilicus into the belly button. A common place for a hernia is the Inguinal Canal in the groin. It’s more common in boys than in girls because there’s a more developed inguinal canal. This is a canal where blood vessels and other tubes go through if you like, there can be a weakness in the wall there.
There are two ways that you get an inguinal hernia. One is at the base of the hernia, and just think of your underneath the skin of the inguinal canal where the groin is. You can get through the muscle tissue, you can get the bowel poking through that or you can get the bowel actually going down through the canal into the canal. Sometimes it goes as far as the testes. And it’s easily treated, but it can get stuck in there, and when it gets stuck in there that could be a surgical emergency because the bowel can be strangulated and die, not the person die, but the bowel die. So your hernia needs to be or on top of.
If you think that you’ve got a lump down in the groin which comes and goes and is painful, you need to get checked by the doctor in case you’ve got a hernia and there are other internal hernias that are much rare that you can have as well.
