Chronic Sinusitis – Follow up

Transcript

What is important to note if you had sinus surgery is to really go and be diligent with your postoperative care. Immediate post-op care the first two to three months. After your sinus surgery, your sinuses are raw tissue, they’re scabbing, and they need routine evaluation by your surgeon. So make sure you make those follow-up appointments. What we typically do is decongest you in the office and use instruments to remove and suction out all the old mucus and the old blood that’s sitting in your sinuses after surgery. We’re also ensuring that the sinuses are kept open and they’re not scarring down. So that’s usually done over the first four to eight weeks after surgery. Once that’s completed, your sinuses are fairly well healed and you’re doing fine. Most of my patients are using saline irrigations to flush out the sinuses. It helps clean out all the scabbing and improve the healing process.

Every patient is different, but once your first couple of months have resolved, and if you’re doing very well with no infections, your doctor would tell you how often he would like to see you. Sometimes I’ll have my patients come in every six months just to monitor their sinus cavities. Make sure there’s no looming infections or no scarring. Now, the fact that you’ve had sinus surgery in one way puts you at an advantage compared to patients who have not had sinus surgery. If you feel you have symptoms of an acute infection, congestion, pressure, discolored mucus that is lasting for more than a week to 10 days, you can go see your primary physician. However, if you end up seeing your ENT physician, we have instruments like scopes that now can enter your nose and look directly into the sinus cavities. Someone who has not had surgery does not have access to that. So since we can directly see into your sinus cavities, we can determine if the mucus looks infected or is it more towards a viral infection. We actually sample the mucus and culture it. This way we can determine exactly what is the ideal antibiotic for you if you need antibiotic. And since you’ve had sinus surgery, we can actually go into the sinus with an instrument and suction out the sinus and remove all that infected mucus as well, allowing for a quicker and faster recovery.