Tummy tucks hurt.
I know I know. Clearly G-d is not a woman. How can something as miraculous as a baby wreak such havoc on our bodies? And then, when we decide “Okay. I am going to suck it up, get the scar, and go through the surgery,” why oh why does it hurt so much?
Tummy tucks are a two layer repair. The first layer is inside, and looks like an internal corset. This layer permanently sutures the fascia tighter. We don’t sew the muscle when we do a tummy tuck. If you ever try to sew muscle, you know sutures don’t hold. You need something stronger, more leathery… something with ooomph in it. So we use fascia.
You would think the long scar on the skin is what hurts. It looks like it should hurt, eh? But it doesn’t. Right after surgery, just like in a Csection, your abdominal skin is numb. The part hurting you is the muscle repair. If you are a typical Bay Area athelete (read triathalon, marathon, “I’ll just bike to the coast today,” or my favorite “I went for a 5 mile hike, but I stayed on the flat parts”), your muscles are well developed and may hurt more.
I use a pain pump which I feel is helpful for my patients after surgery. It is not a PCA, the morphine pain pump with a little button you push and runs via IV. This is a pump filled with a numbing medication, marcaine, and has two small catheters which drip the numbing medication internally along your muscles. You don’t do anything. It lasts for 3 days. I like it. It cuts down on the number of pain pills you take, which makes you feel less woozy and helps with constipation. And it helps keep you from feeling severe pain from right after surgery. There is a lot of research supporting prevention of pain- if you can keep the first pain wave from happening, staying “ahead of the pain,” you do better.
So, pain pumps have been a nice addition to our tummy tuck patients. They don’t stop the ouch all together, but they help.