What to Expect from P/D Surgery and Recovery

I'd like to explain what a patient can can expect from a typical pleurrectomy decortication, at least from my experience over the last eleven years. And typically that means surgery starts usually in the morning, around eight in the morning, and it's about four hour long surgery. We always put some type of device in called an epidural to help with your pain control for afterwards. You'll be on a ventilator, which is normal, meaning breathing on one side, the other side I'll be operating on. I will peel off all that lining of the lung, and again, four hours, so say eight to twelve, You will then go to the ICU. Every patient goes to the ICU afterwards just to really get good monitoring of you, make sure that you recover. You're in the ICU for about two to three days, and then on average after that, the whole length of stay on the floor, the regular floor in the hospital, is about seven to eight days. I tell patients, tell everybody, it's about on average a length of stay of ten to twelve days. From the time of surgery, from when you leave the hospital. The majority of patients will be walking after surgery, be on pain medications, be eating, but the main thing that I always like to talk about and let patients know is that they'll have a lot of tubes in. Everybody's different. I put three to four tubes in, but most people put at least two tubes in. These are chest tubes that'll be on the side of draining fluid and air of where we took off that orange peel of the lung, the lung needs to recover and inflate. And so those tubes help with that, get rid of air, get rid of fluid to keep everything nice and clean in the chest. Those will stay in that whole time, and that's the main reason why patients stay in the hospital. It's because the chest tubes, the lung need to heal. Pain starts to get better after the first week, But it's really those chest tubes, the air leaking around the lung, takes about ten to twelve days. So then you go home. Most patients go home. I would say more on the ten to fifteen percent depending on What you were like Before surgery, would go to maybe a rehab facility for a week or two and then home. Majority, eighty nine percent of my patients will go home, and I always talk to them about that. And so they'll go home, they won't be driving, they'll be eating, walking twenty minutes a day, stairs may be a little harder, and the majority will have a walker just for bracing themselves because it is such a, A fairly big incision, and you still have a little bit of pain and you're recovering. So that's the six week time period. After six weeks, the walker's usually gone driving a little bit, being able to fly. I usually like six weeks to fly. Those are the big things that people ask, or long road trips, things like that. After that, three months. So that's the next time period. After three months is when we'd say, k. You can pretty much do anything you want. You're not gonna hurt anything. And then that's usually anywhere from two to three months after the surgery is when they'll be well enough to start their therapy, some type of systemic therapy, which is usually chemotherapy, Two agents of chemotherapy. So they're totally good by then. Your weight will be back up. You'll feel strong enough for that. That's kind of the overall recovery period. So if we were to rehash, I would say it's in the three month ball six week to three month ballpark. And one other question that I get for patients in terms of what can I expect my functional capacity to be for like what it was before? I'd say on average we shoot for seventy five to eighty percent of your functional capacity of what you were like before. I wouldn't say you can expect every time or for all comers, you're gonna be a hundred percent like you were before you never had mesothelioma. I think that's a little bit on the less side. Certainly, I have patients that are functional, that go back, they work, they do everything, but they notice it. They notice it. Right? They know, So, You know, in the two or three years out, they feel something or or whatnot. It's just not perfect. So really what I say is seventy five to eighty percent. But Driving, moving around, eating, going to dinner, still very, very doable and possible. For whatever it's worth, that's what I think is still good considering we're treating your cancer, but again, it's something for you as the patient to remember that it's very hard to say that you're gonna be one hundred percent back to normal after the surgery and the chemotherapy and all the things that go through treatment.