- A few months before you get surgery, exercise a lot, especially in your core. If you do lots of crunches and/or situps, once you’ve lost a lot of mobility and strength it will be so much easier to sit up and stand up if your abdominal muscles are stronger.
- Bendy straws! It makes drinking beverages so much easier.
- Make sure stuff is in arms’ reach since you won’t be able to reach very far.
- Stay ahead of your pain. Don’t wait until you hurt so much you can hardly move.
- Medicines you are given often give you a dry mouth, so 1. keep lots of water handy 2. get some minty gum because that dry mouth will make it taste like something died in there. Also brush your teeth (duh.)
- Get some stool softener pills. Any sort of narcotic pain killers (like Norco, Vicodin, etc.) will constipate the heck out of you, and milk of magnesia is gross af, just take pills to get the same effects.
- Always wash your hands, it’ll reduce the risk of infection.
- When positioning yourself, make sure your chest is in as little pain as possible, but also make sure you’re not going to make every other part of your body sore as a result. In trying to stop any pressure on my chest whatsoever, I twisted my back around and woke up with a really sore back.
- If you do end up with muscle pains, heating pads are great. If your chest hurts, use cold to treat pain and decrease swelling but only for short periods and with lots of bandages on your chest.
- Get some nice facial wipes because you won’t be able to shower for a week or longer. Also, the night before you get surgery (or whenever the last time you shower before then,) don’t condition your hair. It’s not as healthy, sure, but it’ll keep it from getting too greasy as you won’t be able to wash it for a while.
- Cough drops or some sort of hard candy, also tea with honey is highly recommended, as you’ll probably have a sore throat from the breathing tube they give you under anesthesia.
- If you want to take a non-narcotic pain killer, take tylenol, not an NSAID like advil, because NSAID pills can make bleeding worse. Also, don’t take multivitamins for the week before, as Vitamin E can worsen bleeding.
- Even if you’ve got drains like I did, the first night you sleep, you should put down a towel to sleep on in case you leak from other places under the bandages or surgical vest. This is normal so long as you’re not leaking dark red blood, but then again why stain your sheets when you can avoid it?
- Wear easy-to-move-in and easy-to-remove clothes: no jeans, no t-shirts, stick to button-downs and sweatpants or pajama pants.
Feel free to add more tips!
-L
One last thing, shave your armpits because tape WILL get caught in the hair and that’s quite unpleasant.
I’ve never had top surgery (I’m cis) so I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t be commenting, but I was in a car wreck with a DUI red light runner and the combination seatbelt/airbag/force of the crash gave me sternum pain so bad I couldn’t breathe at times and I was on pain meds so idk maybe it’s comparable.
I second sticking to button downs. My wreck was in January, so I was in flannel button downs and yoga pants for a solid week. Also second the heating pads and staying ahead of your pain. I took my pain meds like clockwork that first week, as directed by the dosage, and things went pretty smoothly.
The one thing I wanted to add though. Since you’re (presumably) going to be able to plan ahead, make sure you have plenty easy to eat foods on hand. I don’t know about top surgery, but experiencing an equivalent of taking a battering ram to your breast bone makes movements like lifting your arms and twisting pretty uncomfortable, so you really don’t want to be cooking. Freezer meals are your friends. Right after I got out of the hospital, we stocked up on frozen dinners, things like frozen lasagna and taquitos I could just stick in the oven and microwaveable meals. Also snacks. I spent half my time right after the wreck watching TV in a painkiller-induced daze while munching on goldfish.
The Paradox Machine 