About a month ago, I had an operation to repair a hernia. It was routine, elective day surgery, privately done at one of those surreally gleaming hospitals where, every five minutes, a man pops his head around the door and asks if you want the salmon parcel or the duck with a honey glaze. (Answer: “Can you see that sign saying ‘Nil by mouth’?”) Perhaps surprisingly, considering how much of my life I’ve wasted worrying about my health, I wasn’t too concerned. Several people I knew had undergone the procedure and they echoed my consultant’s assurances that recovery would be almost indecently easy. Swift, too. I’d be out of the hospital within hours and by the end of the week would be running for the bus, playing tennis, leaping up stairs, etc.

Would I be fit to appear on BBC Breakfast News the following Wednesday to plug my just-published book about hypochondria? You bet. Lifting heavyweights such as my 18-month-old daughter was verboten but, on the plus side, I had a tailor-made excuse for not getting up to change her nappy in the middle of the night.

Memo to self: never plan anything in advance. Ever. The first sign that something might be amiss came early. So much fluid oozed from the wound that the dressing needed changing twice in the first three hours. The nurse looked surprised but, as I had no idea if it was normal or not, I didn’t pursue the matter. What I did know (because the nurse had told my wife) was that the operation had been more complicated than expected. But when we put this to the consultant on his brief bedside visit, he seemed taken aback. “Who told you that?” he asked, before conceding that, yes, the hernia had turned out, once he’d opened me up, to have been not in the inguinal canal in my groin (where hernias usually occur in men of my age, 33) but in the femoral canal at the top of my thigh.

I stayed in hospital overnight and by the morning, back at home, felt well enough to hobble round the house eating Jaffa Cakes. But as the days wore on there was no denying the lack of healing. Beneath my 5in (12cm) scar, threatening to bust the single long stitch holding the wound together, was a hard mass the size and shape of a lemon. Concerned, the nurse at our local GP’s surgery decided to remove the stitch a day early. As she tugged with her tweezers, a good cupful of pinky fluid gushed out of the top half of the incision. She covered the area with a thick wad of surgical dressings, but within hours they were saturated and had to be changed. This would become a familiar ritual over the next couple of days.

Attempts to contact my consultant proved fruitless. He was in Africa on a teaching trip and his stand-in at the hospital-cum-restaurant was about to go on holiday. It was hard to find one of his NHS registrars who was terribly interested. It seemed that the only way to get attention was to turn up at A&E and hope for the best. I don’t remember much about that six-hour descent into Hell, just the odd detail. But they are, I think, salient details.

I remember having a migraine and vomiting everywhere, and the scar opening a little more with every retch. I remember that every time anyone came to examining me they would be called away to see more urgent cases. I remember the feral rage of a father in the cubicle next to mine as his son died. I remember that when the on-call consultant surgeon finally strode in and took charge, it felt like a divine visitation.

I left the hospital that night with a colostomy bag attached to my groin. Not a sexy look, it’s true, but vastly preferable to soaking up the fluid with dressings. After all, the goal over the next few days, while we waited to see if the seepage would cease, was to stop infection setting in, particularly as it was thought, at this stage, that my hernia had been repaired in the standard way, by reinforcing the muscle wall with a piece of mesh. If this mesh became infected, it would have to come out. But this mesh might be the source of my woes, the overproduction of fluid a “foreign body response” by my immune system.

The bag felt like liberation — when it worked. In the event, it held up for only two nights before a blockage caused another painful build-up of fluid. This time, however, we had a secret weapon: the mobile number of the consultant who had treated me in A&E. By the end of the day I was back in hospital being prepared for a second bout of surgery. As it transpired, there was no mesh. The problem turned out to be a complication of femoral hernia repair: a build-up of lymph fluid, triggered by accidental damage to the lymph vessels in the femoral canal.

After two weeks of bed rest and wound-drainage, I’m almost better. However, the experience has affected me profoundly, in good ways as well as bad. It’s cured my hypochondria, but it’s also left me incredulous at our quick-fix culture’s increasingly casual attitude to surgery.

Hernia repair is generally a straightforward, low-risk business. But low risk isn’t no risk. It’ll be some time before I’m running up stairs again. And I can’t be alone in thinking that decent aftercare is slightly more important than posh food you’re not allowed to eat.

I Told You I was Ill: Adventures in Hypochondria, by John O’Connell (Short Books, £9.99), is available from Times Books First at £9.49, p&p is free; 0870 1608080, www.timesonline/booksbuyfirst

Battle of the bulge

• A hernia looks like a lump. It is caused when the muscle and tissues that form the wall of the abdomen become weakened, or break, and some of the internal organs — for example, the small bowel — start to bulge out.
• It most commonly occurs in the groin, and is known as an inguinal hernia.
• Hernia repair is the most commonly performed male operation in Britain, with the NHS performing more than 100,000 hernia procedures a year. Most operations take less than an hour and can be done under local anaesthetic. The surgeon removes the protrusion and sews the weakened muscle together again, sometimes using a synthetic mesh to reinforce the tissue and prevent another rupture.
• Recent reviews have suggested that complications, such as post-operative infections and long-term groin pain, are not rare, occurring in between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of cases. Check that your surgeon is experienced in the procedure.