Sinusitis – Surgery

Transcript

What’s involved with sinus surgery and recovery from sinus surgery? Sinus surgery is done entirely through the nostrils without disfiguring external incisions. It’s all done under general anesthesia, so you’ll be asleep for the entire procedure. Once you wake up from the anesthesia, you’ll go to the recovery room and spend some time there. You’ll have bleeding from your nose for the next several days once you go home. And the thing that bothers people most after sinus surgery is typically nasal congestion. Blood clots will start to build up in the nasal cavity and you might have splints in the nose which can hold the septum right in the midline while it’s healing. You can do different things to try to alleviate this congestion. Saline irrigations can help. Using Afrin nasal spray for some short periods of time can be very helpful as well. Pain-wise, people do pretty well. I give everybody some narcotics to take just in case they have pain above and beyond what Tylenol and ibuprofen might be able to handle. Most patients end up using the pain medication for just a few days at most. Although I do have some outliers who end up using the pain medication more often than other patients who end up not using any oxycodone or pain medication at all.