“I got a farm hernia” I told the doctors as they put me asleep. “I’m going to a strip club tonight.

And I did exactly that. I left the hospital at 2 p.m. only a few hours after they operated on me for a farm hernia. After having dinner with my best friend and his wife we walked into the Dollies strip club in Washington Park, Illinois.

So why am I calling a plain ordinary hernia a farm hernia?

I once asked Kermit, my best friend’s father “what do you do when you have a farm hernia?”

I just tuck in my gut and keep driving that tractor because I have to keep farming until I have all my crops planted before will allow any doctor to operate on me for a farm hernia.

Farming requires a lot of hard physical labor. While doctors ask their patients not to lift more than twenty pounds for two months after having a hernia operation. So farmers face a huge dilemma after getting a farm hernia. On average they have just ten days to get their corn crop planted due to inclement weather in April and May. Long periods of heavy rainfall oftentimes occur in Illinois during these two months. While a delay into June causes huge yield losses. And huge losses that a farmer won’t be able to recover for many years.

So a farmer doesn’t have the luxury of taking a vacation from all that hard physical labor he has to perform after he gets a farm hernia.

I will never forget watching Kermit’s son getting into the cab of his four wheel drive tractor just one day after he broke one of his legs and one f his arms in a single farm accident.

While loading up large trucks with corn in the hallway of our on farm grain elevator complex, Jack fell down on the concrete floor that had become slippery due to the loose grain kernels that had littered the floor.

One day later I found him crawling back and forth underneath a 40 foot long field cultivator replacing worn out shovels. Now a field cultivator is a large tillage tool farmers use to prepare their seedbeds for their planters. A forty foot field cultivator might have 100 shovels. Which routinely come off in the middle of the field and constantly wear out.

I watched Jack shoving his tool box across the dirt as he squirmed back and forth replacing shovels with one of his socket wrenches. Can’t remember how long it took him to get the implement field ready, but it was one or two days afterwards that I saw him getting into that tractor cab carrying two crutches as he lifted himself up the steel ladder attached to his tractor using his arms.

I got lucky when I got that second farm hernia

Because for over a year I never knew I had it. Sure, I felt a fair amount of discomfort most of the time. But the pain never amounted to that much until I tried to exercise. I had to lay off the running. And used a cross country skiing machine for aerobics. But after a few minutes my groin started to hurt like hell.

I must have seen five doctors. And each time I went to see one, the doctor would prescribe ibuprofen or some other pain killer. But each time I saw one of those doctors, the doctor would tell me to keep taking my pain meds.

I never saw that tell tale bulge that accompanies most hernias. Until I decided “to hell with it!” And went all out on my cross country skiing machine.

I suffered from a lot more pain after a few minutes going all out on the cross country skiing machine. It felt like I had ripped my groin to shreds. After I finally saw a bulge in my groin, I went to a surgeon in Carlinville, Illinois.

“You’ve got a farm hernia son,” the new doctor told me. I can operate on you three days from now.

As I mentioned, I got lucky with that second farm hernia. By the time that bulge emerged in my groin we were into the Fall. We had gotten the harvest in and we had already completed all the post harvest field work.

Lady luck had ridden with me when I got the first farm hernia. I got that hernia during the winter when I wouldn’t have to do a lot of hard physical labor.

When I got operated on for that first farm hernia, my good friend, Steve Waters, wanted to take me back to my house and look after me for the next twenty-fours or so. Back then Steve was living in Springfield, Illinois, and Steve loved nothing more than visiting my farm where we could shoot guns and drink a lot of beer together out in the country.

To lessen the post operative pain, the doctor gave me Darvocet.

So within an hour after Steve drove me back to my farm, we started having a few beers together. After we downed several beers, I took a Darvocet capsule. And when Steve asked me what it was, I replied. “Darvocet. I think it’s a narcotic.”

“Let me have one?” Steve replied.

After downing a few more beers and each of us swallowing Darvocet, Steve decided that I felt well enough to accompany him to a Farmersville tavern. Each of us had 19 beers that night. Proving that I was not drunk. Because I could still count.

I am scared to death of having hernia operations. Because the knife comes just too close to my balls.

So while the doctors were giving me the anesthetic for my second farm hernia, I decided to make them all laugh. That’s what I do at hospitals before getting operated on. To conquer my fear.

“Tonight I am celebrating this operation,” I told the doctors. I’m going to a strip club. And get drunk on my ass with all the strippers.”

So true to my word I had Jack and his wife, Donna, drive me to the Dollies Playhouse strip club. Which didn’t take much convincing. Because Donna was an ex stripper. While Jack had met his future wife while she was stripping at the Main Street strip club.

Now that Donna, she was really something. After Jack and I met her I would often go to Main Street and buy her a lot of drinks. She was so much fun to drink with. She would later marry Jack. And become as loyal a wife as they come. For years they would live within 600 yards of me.

I swallowed my second Darvocet only a few minutes after we entered the strip club.

As Alex watched me take it right after I bought us a couple of beers.

An hour later, after I started on my fourth beer of the night, Alex watched me swallow my third Darvocet capsule.

“Don’t swallow it Jack”, Alex yelled at me. But it was already too late.

No doctor would have approved of the things I did that night. I carried at least one stripper around the room. Even though the girls weighed a lot than 20 pounds. While Alex kept telling me, “Don’t.” She’s always being such a mother to me.