Luke - 3.25

3.25mi, 24:49 (7:38)
Mile loops of 7:49 and 7:43.

So last Tuesday morning when I was getting ready for work I coughed pretty hard and my stomach immediately started to hurt.  I didn't know why but I noticed my inguinal hernia (the Wikipedia page for that is a bit NSFW), which I've always had, was protruding more than normal, and when I pushed it back in the stomach pain immediately went away.  All morning I was having to push it back in and it would pop out again within a minute, and I figured that was kind of a bad thing, so I called the doctor and asked if it was something that needed taking care of immediately, soon, or never.  After a few more phone calls I talked to a nurse, who talked to my doctor, who called a surgeon.  The surgery people called me back the next day and scheduled a surgical consult for today.  The nurse had said to avoid strenuous activity, but I wasn't really sure what that meant since I hadn't seen anyone and hadn't gotten much information from the people I did talk to, so for the last week I didn't run and didn't work any overtime.  Went in to my appointment this morning and talked to the surgeon, who was really good about giving me the information I needed, and he recommended surgery to repair the hernia, so we got that scheduled for next Wednesday.  He said I was okay to run between now and then as long as it didn't feel like it was doing any damage, and said I should be okay to run again within a few days to a week after the surgery.
I could feel the hernia bulging on my run today but it wasn't really hurting so I think I should be able to keep up easy runs for the next week.  I won't be able to do the next couple races I had planned, but I should be healthy enough to get the high mileage going this summer as I've been looking forward to doing for a while now.