The thought of having heart surgery can be pretty scary. You may be most afraid of what you don’t know about it. Like — How should you prepare? What will happen during surgery? How long will surgery take? What will recovery from surgery be like? How long will it be before you fully recover? Will you ever be the same again? This article answers many questions and hopefully puts some of your fears to rest.

When You Get Home
Medicines
If you had to stop taking a daily medicine, ask your surgeon when you can begin taking it again. Make sure you are aware of any possible interactions between your daily medicine and the “temporary” medicine you will be given while you are recovering. If you have any reactions as a result [...]

Your doctor has decided that surgery is the best solution to your health problem. He has referred you to a surgeon. The kind of surgeon you will see depends upon your injury or condition. You and the surgeon will talk together about the surgery. He will tell you about the surgical procedure, the risks of having or not having the surgery, and the options available to you in place of surgery. Also, he will tell you what results you can expect. Then, you alone must make the decision to have or not to have the surgery.

There are many kinds of surgery done under general anesthesia. With general anesthesia, you’re “put to sleep” and your breathing is slowed down and the breaths you take are not as deep as you normally take when you are up and active. This puts you at risks for lung and breathing complications like pneumonia. By doing breathing exercises you can help prevent these complications.

In recent years many patients have been treated with minimally invasive total hip replacements. The primary difference between minimally invasive and conventional approaches is how the surgeon exposes and gains access to the hip joint. With the conventional approach, the incision is 10-16 inches long, whereas minimally invasive incisions are one or two small incisions about 4 inches long; one incision is for the acetabular component and one is for the femoral component.

Carotid endarterectomy is the surgical removal of fatty plaque build up from any of the four carotid arteries that supply blood to the neck. Carotid endarterectomy is a preventive measure to prevent strokes. Carotid endarterectomy is usually recommended following a series of strokelike attacks called transient ischemic attacks (TIAs) that suggest a full-scale stroke is [...]

This article is about anesthesia administered by injection or inhalation for the purpose of performing tests or surgery. Anesthesia is used when the pain from the surgery or procedure would be so bad that the patient would not be able to tolerate it. Also, the body’s response to the pain would also prohibit many types of surgery from being done. Surgical anesthesia is a depth of anesthesia that relaxes the muscles along with loss of sensation and consciousness to a level where surgery can be performed.

Cholecystectomy is the surgical removal of the gallbladder. More than 500,000 cholecystectomies are performed each year in the U.S. Cholecystectomy is usually done for gallstones and can be performed as either an open or laparoscopic surgery.