Professor Green says his bowel hernia has come back nine years after it was removed, posting an image on Instagram on Saturday showing the problem pushing through beneath a scar from the earlier operation. The 42-year-old rapper, whose real name is Stephen Manderson, wrote that he was dealing with the issue once again and summed it up in a blunt post: here we go again.
He said the hernia recurrence happened yesterday and described it as a weight he could do without, given everything else he says is going on with his health, though he added that it was out of my control. Manderson nicknamed the hernia Henry and joked, “Violins everywhere, tiny ones,” in the same post, a line that carried the kind of bitter humour he has leaned on through a string of medical scares.
The return of the hernia lands after a difficult run of disclosures. Almost a week earlier, Manderson said on Instagram that he has a tumour behind his eye and three along his spine. He also said four relatively superficial but painful growths had been removed from his head and neck, and that one of them was the size of a blemmin’ lime around his S2 nerve. Waiting to learn whether the tumours were benign or malignant, he said, was worse than living with the physical symptoms.
This latest setback also revives a health problem that has followed him for years. In 2017, Professor Green had a hernia removed, but the operation caused an extremely rare allergic reaction to the surgical mesh used to repair it. That reaction led to a partially collapsed lung, pneumonia and severe abdominal swelling, turning a routine fix into a far more serious ordeal.
Manderson has tried to frame the moment as one more thing to absorb rather than something to be consumed by. In a longer reflection, he said he had learned he is not totally free from historic patterns, but also that he now catches things earlier than he used to and can sometimes observe his thoughts spiralling without spiralling with them. He added that it is the only time any of us have here and said people do have the choice to embrace whatever their experience may be, while working on doing just that and feeling my way through things best I can.
For now, he is still planning to keep working. Manderson said, “I’m playing the next single tonight, tomorrow, all through the Example tour and at every show till it drops,” putting the release in the middle of a tour run rather than on the sidelines. The immediate question is not whether the health problems will stop the music, but how much more his body can throw at him before the tour’s next stop.
