Brussels, May 2025. This story begins with a routine visit to the doctor, which revealed that I had a hernia.
When I expressed surprise and confusion, the doc described a hernia as being the result of a squishy lump of tissue pushing through a weak spot in the abdominal muscle wall and settling, in my case, in the groin.
Apologies to anyone reading this whilst eating, but so many people have since asked me what a hernia actually is that I thought this explanation might be helpful. Like many others, I’ve spent a lifetime saying, or hearing other people say: “Don’t lift that heavy box – you’ll give yourself a hernia!” without knowing what I’m talking about.
As the doctor explained, hernias are not always serious, but they can hurt like hell and in some cases need surgery. He sent me for a scan, which confirmed that my hernia currently required no action, although an operation now would be a simple remedy.
On the other hand, as I wasn’t in any pain, there was no need to do anything, at least not yet and maybe never. As a medical coward and someone who has never been a hospital patient, I was pinning my hopes on never.
The Aeolian Islands, late September 2025
A family summer holiday is entering its last week and on this particular day, the late afternoon sun had turned an eggy yellow and, in the words of an old English expression, everything in the garden was lovely.
Not for much longer: Mikey, the family dog, whose favourite holiday game was to run frantically round the lovely, large garden of our holiday accommodation, rushed off for another race through the undergrowth before supper.
But this time, something went wrong. He let out a chilling doggy wail, and I found him lying on his back in the undergrowth with his left front leg swinging from the elbow like a pendulum.
(I say elbow, because a dog’s front leg is equivalent to a human arm, so he has an elbow, in the same way that dogs have knees on their back legs, although not knees as we know them).
When we found a vet with an X-ray machine, the bone damage it revealed was so bad that she suggested that Mikey must have been hit by a car. He hadn’t – the garden was totally enclosed – but whatever the probable cause, she didn’t have the right facilities to operate.
When we said we were returning home in a week or so, she perked up, and when we said that home was Belgium, she said how lucky we were because she’d heard so much high praise for Belgian health care standards, for animals as well as humans.
For a few seconds, I remembered the hernia lurking within me before forcing myself to focus on the dog’s much more urgent problem.
The vet was brilliant: to keep the dog pain-free and comfortable for the long journey home, she strapped Mikey’s entire left leg and shoulder in rolls of stunning purple bandage, which looked more like a custom-made stylish piece of doggy evening wear for a night at the opera.
The outfit was a big head-turner in those last holiday days when Mikey was obliged to stop for photographs, but, more crucially, the broken left leg was totally immobile, leaving the dog, with help from some painkillers, free to concentrate on three-paw drive until we got home for treatment.
Brussels, early October 2025
Our long-suffering dog was soon mired in a spiral of painkillers, calming tablets, anaesthetics and rehabilitation.
Our chosen vet admired Mikey’s purple regalia and regretted having to tear it off. The first operation went well. When the vet rang with the result, he told us the seven hours of surgery, dealing with multiple bone fractures and inserting replacement metal parts, was the longest in his 15 years as a vet – a bonus, from his point of view, because the scale of the work was professionally challenging.
He laughed when I told him how proud I am that our dog was the one which allowed him the opportunity to extend his professional skills.
Equally challenging for us during several more months of surgical revision and follow-ups has been the domestic living arrangements: Mikey’s determination to keep the same third-floor sleeping arrangements as usual was considered to be positive therapy, but because he couldn’t tackle any sort of climbing, I carried his 12.5kg every night up 42 stairs, and down every morning. That wasn’t a problem – until it was.
Meanwhile, we got Mikey back walking – not the usual random choice of excellent Brussels streets and parks with coffee-and-croissants intervals, but a strictly limited ritual during which increasing numbers of fellow walkers wanted to hear the story of the dog’s hop-along gait and resulting bobbing head, not to mention the tell-tale swollen elbow, with, in the initial post-op weeks, its stylish surgical stitching of metal staples.
Walking Mikey has now taken on aspects of a daily meet-and-greet, although some people misunderstand his situation. One well-meaning elderly woman coming out of a shop just as Mikey and I were approaching frowned at the dog and then looked up at me as I began my ritual explanation with: “He’s had a very serious leg break…”
She looked horrified and replied, almost shouting: “Instead of walking around like this, you should get that dog to a vet!”
We were already almost living with the vet. He even started bringing medical supplies round to the house in person to reduce the number of trips to his medical practice. And what a practice it is. On one occasion, as long-term clients, we were invited to go into the surgical area, with its soothing, blue-lit atmosphere, beeping screens and state-of-the-art X-ray monitors.
All that was missing was a monocled white-coated vet slowly stroking a cat and declaring: “Ah, Mr and Mrs Meade, come in, we have been expecting you…”
Crisis Brussels, 2026
By the end of 2025, as Mikey’s recuperation continued, my hernia was uncomfortable and beginning to hurt, particularly after too much walking, and maybe also from too much dog-carrying: occasionally I was aware that Mikey wasn’t the only limping member of the family.
And so, in February this year, my long run without hospital treatment came to an end when, after a series of pre-op hospital visits, I had keyhole surgery to banish my hernia, and I finally experienced the legendary quality and efficiency of this country’s medical services.
At every turn, from registration to documentation, consultancy and finally surgery, everything was clearly and calmly explained.
It was only a minor operation, and I was home the same afternoon, so the call from the hospital the next day to check how I was feeling and to confirm that everything had been satisfactory was a complete surprise.
The whole thing ran like clockwork, as we used to say in the old days when clockwork was state of the art, and the same is true of Mikey’s continuing but longer recovery programme.
The only problem now is that I’m not allowed to lift anything weighing more than 3kg for a while.
That means that dog-carrying duties have been passed to my other half, who vetoed my alternative plan, which would have involved putting the dog on a starvation diet until his weight dropped below 3kg.
At the time of writing, Mikey is now more or less capable of climbing upstairs, or some of them, on his own. But that still requires human supervision in case he decides to turn round and go back down the stairs, which is still banned because of the extra pressure on his still-prominent wound. He’ll probably always have some sort of limp, but he’s still lively, excitable and wondering what all the fuss is about.
And he seems to have entirely forgotten the horrific (for us) moment a few weeks ago when walking on his lead along the inside of a pavement, he suddenly dropped out of sight into a narrow, uncovered cavity in front of a basement window. After absorbing this bizarre sight and assessing that no new damage had been done from dropping about 70cm and still standing on all four legs, I tried to lift him out.
Impossible: I couldn’t get any more than one arm down beside him and there was no room for leverage to try to heave him back up. Mikey wasn’t barking or whimpering or making any noise at all, just standing there, unable to turn around and patiently waiting for the next development in this crazy world run by humans. I called my wife, who came dashing from our place with some long scarves. The plan was to loop them under Mikey’s belly and raise him up like a helicopter rescue of a goat from a rocky outcrop, but it was difficult to see how to create a sling under his middle.
It was dusk and there were few people around, but a mum and her young daughter were walking towards us, doubtless wondering why we were sprawled half across the pavement, talking to a basement cavity.
I expected them to walk on by, but they stopped, and looked and the mum said she reckoned her daughter, who was about 10 years old, loved dogs and cats, and wanted to be a vet one day, could slip down beside Mikey and lift him up enough for me to get a firm hold of him.
For a moment, I forgot all about the dodgy doggy left leg, and in less than half a minute Mikey was back on the pavement alongside the girl who was rightly delighted with her achievement.
If it sounds like a scene from a shmaltzy Disney movie, that’s because it was, folks, and without having got the names of either mum or daughter, I can’t supply any witnesses except my wife and Mikey.
But it’s all true, and if you’ve read to the end of this domestic saga, I thank you for taking the trouble and hope that your life is running smoothly…
