Hello MacEvan: Thanks for sharing your experience. When I was a teenager, I had a hernia. It meant that I could not play sports in school, which may or may not have been of significance. For the most part, my parents didn't pay much attention to my health needs. I'm an older person &, when I was young, people only went to the doctor or the dentist if they absolutely had to. Anyway, when I was around 16 or 17, my parents did decide to have my hernia repaired. So I had to go into the hospital. This was a small town general hospital... no children's unit. I landed in a bed in a ward next to some old geezer who, I'm pretty sure was dying of cancer or something equally gruesome.

On the first day I was in the hospital, I recall a nurse asking me what I was there for. And when I told her, she gave me this look, like it was something sort-of smutty... sort-of like how did a young man like you manage to get something like that? And so for a long time thereafter, even though I knew better, there was a part of me that wondered if I had done something wrong.