Recovery after Gallbladder Surgery (Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy)

Patients often ask what

recovery

is like after

gallbladder

surgery

when they are considering moving forward with

surgery

to remove the

gallbladder

. Recovery involves many different things and means different things to different people, but in general, there are a few types of topics that are important. cover, first of all, the pain, patients often experience pain after surgery, it is an expected result, the degree to which people experience pain is highly variable and difficult to predict, but in general it is a good idea to take tylenol and ibuprofen if they are safe medications for you. 24 hours a day after surgery and then we often also prescribe an opioid analgesic for pain that is significant after taking those other two medications to give patients comfort in moving around and being able to sleep, etc., the pain lasts different amounts of time.

Typically, patients who have more significant pain and require opioids would only need them for a few days after surgery, but again, this is variable depending on the patient. The next thing that is important in

recovery

is exercise. It is very important after surgery to walk to stand and move around not only to lie in bed as this increases the risk of blood clots and pneumonia, but in terms of strenuous exercise, it is a good idea to avoid anything that causes sharp pain in your incisions while doing so for at least a couple of weeks after surgery and really allow that signal as your body's message to subside if you are doing any activity during the six to eight week period after surgery that cause sharp pain in the incisions, also when it comes to gallbladder disease because this organ is involved in the digestion of fats we have to talk about diet and what is reasonable in terms of diet after surgery the beginning General in the treatment of gallbladder disease is that we want patients to be able to return to eating a normal diet, this means allowing them to eat fatty foods that may have been triggering their symptoms before surgery, which said that the gallbladder plays a role in that process and when it goes away, sometimes patients have an adjustment period of a couple of weeks where eating fatty foods can trigger some of their same digestive symptoms like bloating, belching and sometimes loose stools, so I would say anecdotally that about 80 percent of people don't have that transition period, their body just goes very quickly to understand that the bile storage in the gallbladder is no longer there and That bile is sent directly from the liver and you can eat however you like almost immediately.

About 20 percent of people have bloating, belching, and sometimes loose stools after surgery, and fortunately, this is usually only a self-limiting process after a few weeks. The normality. I have had some patients who have had a lot of loose stools, which made them quite uncomfortable, so they took some fiber during that period of a couple of weeks, but most of the time the patients go back to normal. normal diet and again our goal is for patients to be able to eat how they like, hopefully a healthy diet, but how they like to move forward after surgery. If you want to know more about this, give us a call and visit us at bostongallbladder. com and we look forward to meeting you in person