Scoliosis Surgery Recovery at Home

Post-Op Nutrition

One of the common dichotomies that accompany major surgery of most kinds is that
a: your body needs a steady flow of good nutrition, especially protein to rebuild damaged tissues, calcium to help bones knit and carbohydrates / sugars for energy.
and
b: You may have little-to-no appetite at all.  this is pretty common, especially if it’s taken several days to get your Gut functioning again.  As you’re recovering, your nursing team is on pins and needles waiting for that first good FART from you.  Sort of the opposite polite society has conditioned us to do.  They will be whipping out their stethoscopes every time one of them gets near you to listen to your stomach & intestines for any sign of “activity”.  Now while a big, noisy FART is going to result in a not-inconsequential degree of excitement, an actual TURD will get a gold star placed on your record and some actual FOOD coming your way in pretty short order.

To this end, the nurses / doctors will be supplementing your diet (if that’s what you want to call what’s dripping into your IV) with all kinds of substances designed to wake up your gut and get it moving.
Once you get your gold star and some real food, there’s another series of complications to work around.  In my case it was 4 days with no food of any kind (unless you want to classify Miralax mixed with apple juice as food).  As you might imagine, my stomach had shrunken to the size of a hackey sack.  When this happens, you need to consume your food in multiple, but small, doses.  I also discovered that as soon as I pushed food in one end, “something” (primarily gas) wanted to come right out the other end.  A very clear cause-and-effect relationship had been established.  And while what was coming out was 95-100% pure vapor, it’s not like you want to gamble with that 5% or more…  So I needed to plan for a rapid relocation to the bathroom after any food intake at all during the first few days.

Once you’re on your own (home) you need to figure our how to slowly increase your diet to the “new normal” levels your GI tract will tolerate.  Back when I was running 5 miles every morning, my favorite breakfast was (roughly)

• 1 cup orange juice
• a handful of frozen strawberries
• 2 scoops of SOY protein powder (I’m a vegetarian)
• 1 banana

Put all this in a blender and puree into a frothy-yet-delicious liquid breakfast.

It’s easy to prepare, consume, digest and very healthy.  It also doesn’t contribute to the constipation that’s common with post-surgical patients on fairly high doses of pain killers.  Unfortunately, one of the less-deisrable side-effects of many narcotics is “cloggage”  and not the dancing kind, either.  There’s nothing the least bit rhythmic about this.