When I talk to people about my experience with heart surgery, one of the first things they ask is “How painful was it?” And, I guess it was also one of the first questions I had before going through surgery.
Now, of course, like many things, the answer is “it depends.” And, to an extent, that’s true because we’re all different and we experience and react to situations in different ways. But let me tell you about my experience and give you some tips to help manage pain.
My first mitral valve surgery was performed robotically – I had one 3-inch incision and several smaller incisions on my right side by my ribs, and my surgeon guided small surgical tools using a high definition camera to perform the surgery. When I woke up in the ICU, I was disoriented and groggy, but did not have severe pain. I was hooked up to several IVs, and had a pain pump, which is a device that you hold in your hand (remember the Wii?) that has a button on top that you push when you have pain and it releases a measured amount of pain medicine into your IV. You can push the button as needed, and then at some point it stops administering pain medication because you’ve reached the threshold for the current time. If you do not have a pain pump, then your nurse will administer pain meds into your IV initially, and then eventually, you may take them by mouth.
The key to managing your pain is to stay ahead of it. At the first sign of any pain, use the pump if you have one, or ask for pain meds. You will be so much more comfortable. This is not the time to be a hero and see how much pain you can tolerate before asking for pain meds.
I used the pain pump for a couple of days (in ICU and my hospital room) and then I used Tylenol for the rest of my recovery. For those of you who have had experience with pain medication for a surgery, you’ll want to think back as to how your body reacted to the medications. In my case, I ended up being nauseated by the pain meds, however, they did give me some medication for nausea that helped.
My second surgery was open heart. Before going in, I was even more concerned about the level of pain post-surgery, because after all, this was open heart surgery, but surprisingly enough, once again, I had very little pain. Sure, I was sore at my incision, and a little sore all over, but honestly, my pain level was pretty low and definitely manageable with the pain meds. Once again, I used the strong pain meds the first few days and then after that, just Tylenol. With the open heart surgery, I did experience a lot of back pain, which is not uncommon. I ended up getting an in-room massage, which was really helpful – make sure you check to see if your hospital offers something similar.