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After sinus surgery, depending on the extent of the surgery and depending on the individual techniques that your surgeon likes to employ, you may or may not have dissolvable packing of some sort in your nose. You may have no foreign objects in your nose. Some may place a temporary pack in the nose that needs to be removed. It depends on your surgeon and the extent of the surgery that you had. But what can you expect in terms of recovery from sinus surgery?
Well, firstly, you should expect that there should be no external signs that you’ve had surgery. When you wake up, if you look in a mirror, there shouldn’t be any bruising or swelling on the outside of your face. You are certainly entitled to have some discomfort in the general region, low grade headache, local pain in the region of the nose and cheeks and around the eyes. Generally that pain, at least in my patients, is short-lived, 48 hours of mild discomfort maybe. And this is well controlled with Tylenol and Motrin. Sometimes doctors will give a low dose narcotic medications. Certainly in today’s environment, we’re trying to move away from using narcotics if possible, but if they’re necessary, certainly for a few days, one may need to take a stronger pain pill, such as a low dose narcotic.
You’ll likely be given an antibiotic and maybe given a low dose oral steroid to take, to reduce inflammation afterwards. There can be some bleeding after sinus surgery. We do not sew everything closed, so there are raw surfaces after the sinus surgery. In which case, you may be given some topical nose drops to use that can help reduce any bleeding after surgery. You may be sent home with a gauze to put under your nose to help catch some of that bleeding for the first 24 hours. But generally you should not have any excessive bleeding after a sinus surgery. If you do have excessive bleeding after a sinus surgery, you should contact your sinus surgeon so they can evaluate to see what’s going on there and whether they need to do something about it to help stop that bleeding.
