How long is recovery?
That depends on the surgery and how you define recovery. Every surgery has a different recovery in terms of pain, function, and activity restrictions. Severity and duration of symptoms can impact speed and quality of your recovery. Please review the brain treatment and spine treatment sections in this website for details regarding surgery and surgical recovery.
When can I drive?
In many cases, patients go back to driving once they are off the pain medications prescribed after surgery and once they are able to make evasive maneuvers. There are exceptions to this that need to be considered though–this includes patients with prior seizures and other medical elements that can impair driving. Our team will discuss this with you as part of your care.
When can I return to work?
Return to work after surgery is often based on activity restrictions. Our office will help with FMLA paperwork and coordinate with your employer as needed for work limitations after surgery. Our office only provides work release for the postoperative period. Longer-term work release and disability evaluations should be run through your primary care provider.
Will I need physical therapy?
After surgery, physical therapy is often limited to allow you to recover. At your first postoperative appointment, we will evaluate you and determine if physical, occupational, or speech therapy is needed. In some cases, patients would benefit from inpatient rehabilitation after their inpatient hospital stay, which will be at the discretion of hospital therapy team.
What are the risks?
There are general and specific risks to all surgeries. In general, bleeding, infection, constipation, postoperative nausea, and pain can occur after surgery to varying degrees, and can cause complications. For spine surgery, we also are worried about injury to the spinal cord, nerve roots, and nerves depending on the nature of your surgery, as well as the sac that holds the nerves. For spine fusion surgeries, we also worry about risks associated with implant placement, bone healing, spinal malalignment, and progression of spinal disease. For brain surgery, risks are often associated with the location within or outside of the brain being operated on, it can range from weakness, numbness, tingling, speech difficulty, language understanding difficulty, vision impairment, cognitive difficulty, and other less obvious complications. We will discuss at length the risks, benefits, indications, and alternatives of your specific surgery with you. We want to make sure that we both agree that surgery is the right plan for you.