When I was 14, I noticed there was a small lump of skin in my scrotum, just above my nuts. I was so dumb that I thought it was the formation of a new testicle. I had recently seen in the news clippings with a woman who had three breasts, so I thought, well, it could be applicable to guys as well. So the dummy decided that I should wait and see if there was a third testicle that was going to grow. I also thought that this would be a sign of fertility. Fast forward 1.5 years later, and the lump became bigger and oddly shaped, and it was a lot of pain a lot of the time. At that time, I had recently read about cancer in school, so now I had convinced myself that the lump was actually a tumor. That started freaking me out a lot. I used to masturbate a lot, so I believe that that was the reason that this was caused. Since I had never really had a sex talk with my parents about masturbation habits, I was too shy to talk to my parents about it at all. The tumor would retract back into my abdomen sometimes, and one time when I actually mustered the courage to talk to my parents about it, it had retracted back. They assumed that the pain was just being caused by because of my testicles descending. So I also ignored it and prayed that the tumor would just go away. A few years went by, and I tried to ignore my tumor as much as possible. Once I read on articles about cysts, I believed that the swelling could also be a cyst. Whenever I'd read about a new swelling or tumor, I just believed that that's what I had. When I started college, I moved into a dorm. I would try everything possible for people not to see me naked. The tumor had become so ugly, and it was a constant size now. I just assumed that my body was abnormal and I couldn't do anything about it. Fast forward to this year. I'm currently 21. I'd come back from my home because of COVID. One day I was changing my clothes after taking a shower. My brother accidentally walks into the room while I'm changing my clothes, and he saw my crotch. He was ridiculously surprised about the monstrosity that it looked like. That was the first time I confessed about my crotch issues to anyone. After having this tumor for so long, I was more ashamed of being an adult. I wasn't able to come clean about medical issues I was facing. My brother nudged me for a few days and forced me to go talk to my parents about this issue. I finally caved and talked to my father about this. He took me to a doctor the next day. I was so nervous that the doctor would be shocked and that I would be diagnosed with stage 4 cancer or something. And it turns out it was just a hernia. Apparently, as the doctor had speculated, this hernia was caused because my muscles will reek and the gap created when the testes descended didn't seal properly, causing the hernia. I got my surgery scheduled a few days later. I got the laparoscopy to treat my hernia. It's been 1.5 months since the surgery and I've made a great recovery since. So I've wasted over 6 to 7 years of my life overthinking and living with discomfort because of a hernia.