Mommy Makeover Recovery With Kids: Planning Help at Home
Dr. Smith discusses planning for childcare, everyday tasks and time away from work after a mommy makeover. The conversation also touches on comfort, scars, swelling and the gradual development of results.
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Key takeaways
- Plan for practical help, childcare and access to everyday items before surgery.
- Discuss lifting children and work arrangements with your surgical team.
- The video distinguishes early recovery from the longer process of scar maturation and developing results.
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Video transcript
Transcript from the source video’s English caption track. Recovery examples are part of this recorded discussion; follow your own surgical team’s instructions.
0:00 Another question patients frequently ask is, especially if they do have children at home, the type of support they need to recover from these surgeries, whether it's how many hours or days should they have nursing care or how long until a loved one can efficiently take care of them. What do you recommend is the best form of plan for recovery? Yeah, I mean, it's so important and something that is so easily overlooked. And the, the best way to make this easy is to plan,
0:26 plan, plan from everything to taking time off from work, making sure you have childcare, making sure the items around the house that you need easy access to aren't on a high-up shelf. In terms of the exact recovery, the truth is it's different for everyone, but there are some reasonable expectations that I would set. For the first two or three days, you will be up walking around, but you won't be doing much more than that.
0:52 And for the first week, you're gonna be walking a bit bent over because everything is so tight after a tummy tuck. So I would really plan on having significant help available for everything from cooking to showering to really taking care of yourself for two or three days. Days three to seven, you start to become more independent. You might be making small meals for yourself, really just kind of putting things in the microwave or making a sandwich.
1:20 By about a week, you're going to be, you know, getting back into the swing of things. I tell my patients that can work remotely, they generally feel comfortable doing so by seven days after surgery. Specifically with respect to childcare, it depends a lot on the age and behavior of your child, but I really like my patients to plan on a good two weeks where they're not lifting up their kids. So if that's something that you can arrange for your partner or a parent to
1:45 help you with, that's a really good move as well. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that a tummy tuck and a mommy makeover is not significant surgery. It absolutely is. First is we're using more and more advanced multimodal pain regimens, often either minimizing or avoiding narcotics altogether to help you feel comfortable and get you up out of bed quickly. Scars are a necessary part of these procedures, and you're
2:12 exactly right. We're trading shape for scar. And scars in general start out red, and they can be thick, and they're usually kind of at their worst from weeks four to six, and then they begin to improve. While we often say that they have kind of done their most improvement by about a year or out to two years, scars really continue to mature for the rest of your life.
2:38 But when you look in the mirror, you're gonna be a little, "Eh." You'll like the shape of your breasts, but otherwise you- you're gonna be pretty swollen. And it honestly takes maybe a month for most of that swelling to go down to the point that you're gonna be pretty pleased of your appearance. It really takes about three months for, I'd say, 70% of your results to come in, and really a full year for the full results to become apparent.