Laparoscopic Surgery

Transcript

The laparoscopic surgery is also called minimally invasive surgery. The reason it’s called that is because instead of the large incision with hands in the abdomen, there’s a series of small incisions made around the abdomen. One of the incisions is for passing through the laparoscope. The laparoscope is a long, thin, very tiny camera. And once the camera’s inside the abdominal cavity, it gets inflated with air. And that way you can look around with the camera, the other incisions. So you have two incisions, one on either side, are going to be just big enough to let through little remote tools at the end of arms, that the surgeon can operate from the outside with his hands. So the surgeon is looking through the camera and operating the tools remotely from the outside of your body and can remove your appendix that way. So people always ask, well, what’s the recovery time for surgery for an acute appendicitis?

Well, in addition to depending completely on your baseline health, assuming you’re a relatively healthy person, then the recovery time will depend on which of the two surgical techniques your surgeon used. The open surgery because it’s a little more involved and there’s more healing to be done, you can expect to stay in the hospital, you know, two to three, maybe four at the most days. And then when you go home, you still can’t return to work. It’s going to take about two to four weeks for you to go back to your normal activities. The laparoscopic surgery, because it’s minimally invasive, involves less healing, and you sort of get on your feet sooner. So you can expect to be in the hospital only one or two days. And then usually within one to two weeks, you can return to your normal activities. Now, again, this is all considering that you just had appendicitis and there were no complications at the appendicitis.