Varicose Veins – Procedures and Recovery Process

Transcript

“Now, as far as recovery time from these problems, once you are being considered as a candidate for surgical therapy, meaning laser or radiofrequency ablation of these veins. Let me take you through the process of therapy. You come to our office, it’s an outpatient office. You come and you meet the provider face to face. You don’t have all those layers of nursing and ancillary testing before, you just come straight to the office. You walk into that table and the procedure is done with an ultrasound technologist, the interventionists and the patient, the procedure is so minimally invasive that the patient can have their significant other, kids, siblings, whomever they want holding their hands through the procedure. And that explain basically step by step, how this is done usually. And we have this in our suite. The patient is laying down and there is a TV monitor on the ceiling.

So they can actually watch a show or watch their own procedure being done while being awake. And so it’s a very, very spa-like atmosphere where this is done. The procedure usually in skilled hands will take anywhere from seven to 15 minutes. To access the vein, numb it up and shut it down, we heat. And in the end, we apply wraps to the legs to give the swelling down and just this little, maybe hematoma from the needle stick that you did and the needle sticks are used to numb up the vein and patients stand up and they walk out of here. Usually we do these procedures on a Friday. So if people need to take the day off or the weekend off, they can take it easy that weekend. But if a patient works on the weekends, we tell them that they can take it easy that night by Saturday morning, they can be in full force, full activities without restricting their lives, diet medication, nothing changes.

And what we require is a visit to our office five days after. And in that visit, there’s a visual inspection of the leg. There’s a conversation as far as the improvement of (?) should be that quick. They should notice already the relief on that pressure a few days after the procedure. And we do an ultrasound that day because the goal is to apply the heat about three to four centimeters away from the deep system. If you apply the heat too close to the deep system, you can create clots yourself. It can be an iatrogenic clot creation that can actually become a pulmonary embolism if you don’t treat that appropriately. So you want to make sure of two things. One of them is that the vein was properly shot all along and second that there’s no clots affecting the deep system that you caused by heating the vein up too close. And so once this is done, and usually that happens in more than 99 out of a hundred people, patients can go on with their life. I advise them to use stockings, and I usually give them the option to return to my clinic in six months, in case there’s any risk of varicose veins are bothering them or in case there’s something to discuss. Quite often they just call to say things are good. My pain is gone. I don’t have to come. And we’re happy with that.”