I'm back! Let's talk about my intestines.

I missed me too!

Do you ever have something eating away in the back of your mind, that you keep putting off extensively?  Did you ever put it off for 7 months?  Probably?  Well that thing for me is this site.

So, now that I have the hankering to write again let me reintroduce myself... again.

I started this blog on the last stretch of my senior year of college with the intent to write once a week about video games for an entire year.  I made it a good 17 weeks, got incredibly disgusted at the poor quality of my written work, and then swiftly ended that project.  However, I never lost my desire to write or to pursue the path of writing - I just had to grow up a bit more, learn that failure is a part of progress, and continue to push through the challenges until I become a great writer.  Is now that time?  Let's find out together.

So, now that I've got that out of the way I'd like to talk to you about the time my intestines fell into my scrotum.  Too personal?  Even for myself, maybe, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway because I hope you may find it funny/enlightening.  

It is my sincere desire, now that I'm writing for this blog once more, to write about more than just video games because I have a lot more going in my life than that.  In fact, until Tuesday last week I had a little problem going for the last several months that I may have no more, and naturally it has been on my mind a lot.  

You may (but probably not) remember that I wrote a little bit about my workout program while I was living in Taiwan.  Well, let me tell you the part of that story which swiftly ended that.  I had been going to my gym regularly in Tainan City, and I loved it: my status as a foreigner meant that all of the Taiwanese staff and other gym members regularly recognized me and we had a good relationship going.  Going to that gym was a place of rest and comfort, yet it was also a place of progress and improvement.  I was making great strides on my body, was developing and seeing muscles I had never seen before, and confidently I was working almost every major muscle group in my body - arms, chest, core, legs.  What I didn't count on was the poor condition of my non-child-bearing hips.  

So jealous.

You see, on the inside of your legs are these little muscle groups which work to pull your thighs inward, or push outward - these are the adductor and abductor muscles, respectively.  Any dumb schmuck in a foreign gym filled with trainers who don't speak the same language as that gym patron could step up to a adductor-training weight machine and think, "Wow, these muscles I have are so strong I don't even have to start at a low weight, I can do half the bar already!  I must have naturally strong legs.  I'm also really handsome, and not at all a dumbass."

Do I need to continue?  In a hurry, quite suddenly I felt the sharpest of pains when I tried to run one day.  I took a rest, and sure enough, the next gym day came and once again I couldn't run without great pain.  Then, I realized I couldn't lift weights with my right shoulder muscle without great pain.  Then, I realized I couldn't lift my arm heigher than my head without great pain.

"Okay, so I hurt myself.  This muscle is in my abdomen so it affects my entire body performance.  Shit.  Oh well, I guess I'll just wait for it to heal and try not to get fat again in the meantime."  However, this pain didn't go away.  A few months later, after finishing my time in Taiwan and returning to the United States, I got sick.  Not bad sick, just a common cold.  But, the problem was that this made me cough, a lot.  I didn't think much of it, other than each cough was incredibly painful, but when those hurt muscles were given this added strain, it led to a whole other issue I could never have expected.

When it was all over, and my coughing had subsided, I noticed a lump where that muscle had been.  This lump extended from that spot on the front of my pelvis and extended, like a curious puppy making his way around my privates, from that pubic zone right into the warm open space that was my scrotal sack, pushing his buddy (my right testicle) out of position like an overweight man hanging over his seat on an airplane.  

"Hey!  What the fuck is going on?  Get out of there!"  Next, I noticed, if I applied some soft pressure this lump would subside, almost as if I was pushing some kind of foreign passenger back into the recesses of my abdomen.  "Hmm, I must just be super good at relaxing that muscle back down.  There is no way at all that this lump I feel that falls out of place is my FUCKING small intestine now poking out of me like a slimy tapeworm."  

I bet you really wanted to see this today.

Well turns out it was.  Now you know what it is like to discover you have an inguinal hernia.  For the next couple weeks after I realized what was going on with my body, I soon found out what happens when you work on your feet for 60 hours a week with an open hernia.  Bad things.  Nothing life threatening, just make your life shitty-threatening.

Last Tuesday I had the surgery to fix my hernia, and have been out of work for the last week because of it.  What do you do when you're out of work for a whole week?  Well, if you're me, you watch a hell of a lot of Dexter and play a lot of games.  Ironically, the only console game I played at all was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a game which I wrote about during my last period of writing.  But, I don't intend to write about that game again (most likely).  Instead, I have a big urge to talk about the system which is new to me (I only bought it about 3 weeks ago), but took up the majority of my time while I was healing.  So, next time, I want to talk about iPad gaming!  

Til next time~

Shane