How is the Recovery Process After Your Tummy Tuck?

Your tummy tuck surgery was a success. The plastic surgeon had gone about the procedure in a professional manner and succeeded in tightening your abdominal muscle and trim unnecessary skin to give you a firm and smooth abdomen. This cosmetic procedure not only got rid of the loose skin, flabby muscles and excessive fat in the abdominal area, but also did away with a sense of worthlessness that consumed you in your out-of-shape body. Now the only thing left for you is to take proper steps to accelerate the recovery process.

Tummy tuck aftermath

Just describing the cuts and stitches in tummy tuck procedure will make some cringe. Of course, the body gets all cut up in this surgery. The common side effects experienced are discomfort or pain, which for the first few days may require pain killers, bruises and swelling of the abdomen, bleeding, numbness of the central part of the abdomen below the navel and even nausea or vomiting after general anesthesia.

Steps to recovery

There are some steps to tummy tuck recovery:

a. Postoperative care in the hospital: The moment you’re wheeled into your room from the operation theatre, postoperative care for recovery commences. This mainly includes rest and a regimen of antibiotics and painkillers. You’ll be lying with your legs bent at the hips, to reduce the strain on the abdominal area, and wearing a compression garment over the treated area to control swelling and speed up healing.

Although, medically a 2-day bed rest is recommended, but depending upon your condition, you can show good recovery in a few hours or may take several days to recover. Basically, it’s the degree of your physical fitness that’ll dictate the speed of recovery, so the fitter you are the faster will be the recovery.

b. Care at home: The thing to bear in mind is you don’t become fit at the hospital and then go home. Healing is an ongoing process, so you’ll need to be doubly careful at home, since no medical help will be at hand. This is the reason why your surgeon will give you explicit and personalized instructions regarding tummy tuck recovery. The directions will include ways to prevent blood clots, monitoring infection in the scar wound and optimizing tummy tuck recovery, including ways to prevent excessive scarring. Tummy tuck recovery for a person with strong abdominal muscles can take less than two weeks, while for those unaccustomed to exercise may take significantly longer. Full tummy tuck recovery generally takes 6 months, when all swelling is gone and scar tissue is drastically reduced.

c. Maintaining the new abdomen: Now that you’ve got a brand new middle, maintaining it that way is important. And maintenance basically involves a good exercise and diet regimen. This’ll reduce tummy tuck swelling, tone the muscles and lower the chances of blood clots. Of course, light exercise in the beginning is recommended, until you feel comfortable in doing vigorous exercises.

Identify the danger signs

There’s every likelihood for you to consider any ailment and discomfort you feel while recovering a natural stage of recovery. However, this may not be so and may even prove harmful. So, if anytime you feel severe pain, signs of infection, like redness in the scar tissue accompanied by fever and breathing difficulties, contact your surgeon right away.

The process of recovery may discourage some in considering tummy tuck surgery as an option to get their youthful looks back. However, if you’re physically fit and healthy, but only out-of-shape, you should not fear the scalpel, because not only would you take the surgery well, you’ll recover quickly too.