My surgery recovery earlier this year was the first I’ve had in 5 years I had several months to prepare for it, which made my overall recovery easier. Unfortunately, I am a surgery pro, which is why I’ve pulled together a list of 15 things to do to make your recovery go smoothly. I hope that these tips for recovering from surgery help you, too!

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Surgery Recovery Prep: Food

Grocery shop, with a focus on freezer food or shelf-safe products – Obviously you need food, but you should definitely focus on food that can go in your freezer or that will not go bad. If something were to happen that required you to stay in the hospital for a few days, you don’t want to have to spend money on food that you have to toss when you get home. And even if you go home on schedule, anesthesia can mess with your appetite and what appeals to you for weeks. Again, you don’t want to spend money on something that goes bad before you can eat it. 

Getting frozen meals also makes your life easier in the weeks and months post-op. Your energy will be limited for a while, so cooking can be nearly impossible. Getting meals that you can just pop in the microwave will enable you to avoid cooking a while longer. Even if you live with your support system, relying on others for everything gets old quickly. Being able to get yourself dinner – even if that just means making a frozen meal – will help you feel more self-sufficient quickly. 

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Prep frozen and dump meals – Similarly, making meals ahead of time and freezing them is a great way to have healthy and delicious meals ready to go when you’re recovering, as is making “dump” meals! Dump meals are when you do everything for a meal but cooking. Essentially, you cut up ingredients, pull together spices, and put them in the freezer. Then, when you’re ready to make them, you just dump them into pans and cook them! 

This is a great strategy if you’re having minor surgery that will limit your energy but not make too much of a difference in your day-to-day life or if you live with someone who is super busy. Have a partner who works a lot or who will be doing the majority of parenting when you recover? Have a teenager who can be trusted to pre-heat the oven and put the meal in, but maybe you don’t super love the idea of them using knives? Prep the dump meal and then you or your support system just dumps it when it’s time.

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Surgery Recovery Prep: Money

Everyone deals with different levels of financial impact when they have surgery, but it can differ a lot from person to person. The tips in this section may apply to some people but not others, so pick and choose the ones that help you the most.

Pay bills ahead of time if possible – Paying ahead of time is best for people who are having surgery near their bill due dates or who are worried that they won’t remember to pay them when recovering. You don’t want to stress about paying bills, especially if something goes wrong and requires you to be hospitalized longer than planned. Maybe you’re a single parent or maybe you don’t want to have extra stress. Basically, pay ahead of schedule if you can. 

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Save money – This is most helpful for when you have a lot of time between when surgery is decided on and when it happens. Basically, from the moment I was hospitalized in September 2022 to when I had surgery in May 2023, I was saving money. But this is not the normal amount of time between decision and actual surgery; it certainly wasn’t the usual for my other surgeries! But saving even a little bit each month can add up in the end, which was definitely true for me. 

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Have short or long-term disability insurance? Get that pay-out set up – I’ve had health problems since 2001, so for every job I’ve had that had it available, I’ve signed up for short and long-term disability insurance. The difference between short and long can depend on the insurance company, and for mine, it would become long-term after 12 weeks. The way my company works, once I had a surgery date in January 2023, I alerted my manager so the team could prepare for how long I would be out. At our company, you meet with HR 2 months before your scheduled absence. My HR team is great, and they helped me decide what route I wanted to take between the Massachusetts insurance and the insurance through my company. HR sent me the necessary paperwork, I filled it out, and I brought the applicable forms to my doctor. 

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Set up a GoFundMe or similar site – Unfortunately, if you live in the USA, you might need to set up a GoFundMe to cover costs. Whether it’s because you don’t have awesome insurance or because you need to take time off of work and don’t have short or long-term disability insurance, there are a lot of reasons why you might need to crowdfund your bills. 

When you set up your site, I recommend explicitly stating what the money will be used for and how you came to the value you chose. Estimate your weekly bills and how long you think you will be out of work and break it down in your site. (“I’m aiming for $x because I’ll be spending x on groceries, x on utilities, x for rent,” for example.) If you have an estimate for your bills from your hospital, name that. You get the picture. 

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Surgery Recovery Prep: Medications 

See what over-the-counter medications you should stock up on – Often, doctors will tell you what you should get before surgery, and it will depend a lot on what type of surgery you have. Maybe you don’t normally take NSAIDs or acetaminophen and they’re recommending that, even if it’s not for immediately post-op. Hopefully, you’ll have prescription pain medication prescribed. If that’s the case, you should get stool softeners to take while you’re on the prescription, as they can cause constipation. Basically, get medication that you will probably need while you’re recovering, and get it before you need it so you have it. 

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Refill medications – You should also refill your medications ahead of your surgery! If you are able to, get 60 or 90-day fills of your meds. That way you not only don’t have to pay for those medications when you’re recovering, but you also don’t have to force yourself (or rely on someone else) to go to the pharmacy. 

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Fill pill boxes – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one of my biggest tips for chronic illness patients is to have multiple pill boxes so you can fill 3-4 weeks of meds at once. This helps you figure out when you’re going to run out of some medications, but it also means you’re less likely to miss doses as you’ll have 3-4 weeks of medications ready for you. But when it comes to surgery, this is extra helpful because it’s one fewer thing you have to do when recovering. And if you’re staying with someone else while you recover, you’ll be able to do that for several weeks. 

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Surgery Recovery Prep: Clothes

Do a lot of laundry – This is pretty self-explanatory, but do as much laundry as you can before you have surgery, and do it as soon as 1 day before surgery so you’ll be good on clean clothes for a while. And you specifically want to make sure that your post-surgery clothes are clean. 

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Sign up for a laundry service – This isn’t for everyone, but I did it for this past surgery, and it has been a game-changer. This was my first surgery since I moved out, and I’m not living at a house with laundry in it. If I want to do laundry, I have to go to a laundromat. Plenty of people do that; the problem is that I had abdominal surgery and wasn’t allowed to lift over 10 pounds for the first few months. Even after the point when I was allowed to lift over 10 pounds, it wasn’t comfortable for a long time, let alone carrying laundry to a laundromat. Instead, I signed up for Rinse, which comes to your house to pick up your laundry and deliver it, too. This is definitely something I’m still going to do when I’m fully recovered from surgery, as there will be days when I’m not able to walk the distance to a laundromat. 

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Buy surgery-appropriate clothes – This will look different for different people and different surgeries. When I had subtalar fusion surgery, I needed pants that would fit over my splint and later cast. When I had abdominal surgery, I bought cheap leggings and shorts that were a size larger than I normally wear so they would be comfortable over my incisions. If you’re having surgery on your arm, you’ll want shirts that can easily fit when you have limited mobility. You get the picture. 

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Surgery Recovery Prep: Miscellaneous 

Clean – This is one of those things that you’ll do the day before your surgery. Do a deep clean, throw out trash, tidy your space, change your sheets, etc.

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Get a shower chair – Regardless of the type of surgery you have, you’re going to be dealing with fatigue for a while. You’ll have fatigue from having a big thing done to your body, yes, but also from the anesthesia. Getting a cheap shower chair will make showering easier and less pain-inducing. And once you buy one, you have it for any future medical procedures! 

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Buy gifts ahead of time – Obviously, this will depend on the time of year you have surgery. My abdominal surgery was in May, so I went ahead and bought gifts for Mother’s Day, my mom’s birthday (in June), and Father’s Day. And I was so glad that I had, considering I woke up from surgery and found out that my recovery was going to be twice as long as expected. I didn’t have to worry about buying gifts for my mom’s birthday or Father’s Day because I already had them! It sounds small, but getting those gifts ahead of time made my life a lot easier. 

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Like this post? Share it! Then check out: 

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