Extreme Fatigue After Open Heart Surgery

Whats Normal And Whats Not

A certain amount of discomfort is normal after any surgery. Your doctor can provide you with information about what you may experience as part of your recovery.

You should begin to feel like youre starting to get back to normal after about eight or 10 weeks of recovery. If youre still experiencing shortness of breath or significant pain in your incision at that point, talk to your doctor.

Also, watch for warning signs that might mean you need immediate medical attention. Redness or drainage resembling pus in your chest area may signal infection, for example. Abnormal pain is also a red flag.

While you will have good days and bad days, if you feel like you are sliding backward more than a couple of days in a row, dont hesitate to call! Your care team would rather hear from you early if there is any question about a problem with your recovery.

Contact your doctor if you have questions or concerns about what you experience during your recovery. Making sure youre well-informed helps you avoid problems and speeds your recovery as much as possible.

Exercise And Physical Stress

Exercise and other activities such as strenuous work normally cause fatigue because such activity stresses the body. In order to recover, the body triggers a fatigue response so that the person will be encouraged to rest.

This is a normal stress-recovery cycle. Undergoing surgery where the body is given medications and traumatized by procedures can cause fatigue as the body enters into the repairing and healing mode.

Why Weak Legs After Open Heart Surgery It’s Ten Months Since My Open Heqrt

Why weak legs after open heart surgeryIt’s ten months since my open heqrt surgery. Why are legs still weak?

The only thing I’ve noticed is the effect of statin anti-cholesterol drugs. I take Co-enzyme Q10 to combat this.

I had OH for an MVP repair 16 months ago and got back to exercise pretty quickly. In fact I was on the bike within 3 weeks and after 1.5 months I was moving along pretty good, biking and hiking. Last year I did over 2800 miles of riding and back to playing hockey.

Leg pain,,, well now that a lot of the parts have settled I found that after about 10-15 minutes of riding my legs can’t go any faster , they start to yell at me. I take Metoprol Tar since surgery and besides the allergic reaction it holds me back. I blame the leg pain on that drug as I only took a BP med before and I could certainly push myself much harder.

Now I know I shouldn’t feel depressed about this because I’ve been repaired but being able to enjoy my rides has pretty much gone away in the last month. Anyone else gone thru this?

metoprolol is in a class of drugs called beta blockers. Its goal is to control your heart rate and help stop it going too high, and help keep your blood pressure a little lower with the ultimate aim of the high rate and bp undoing the valve repair and creating more damage.

The bottom line isnthat you may have to change your target from speed and distance to looking at and enjoying the world.

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Pots: A Little Known Cause Of Extreme Fatigue

Everyone knows what being tired feels like at the end of a long day. But some people experience fatigue so severe and so seemingly random that its hard to describe. If that sounds familiar, there could be more going on than daily stress.

While there are many causes of fatigue, one of them is frequently missed and misdiagnosed: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome . Physical medicine and neuromuscular specialist Tae Chung, M.D., answers questions about POTS and extreme fatigue as one of its symptoms.

Is Pots More Common In Certain People

There are no established risk factors for POTS. However, it is known to run in families, so it could have a genetic component. Researchers have also established a link between POTS and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome . So if you have one of these conditions, you might also have the other.

A big group of those diagnosed with POTS is young women and teens. However, this doesnt mean they are more likely to develop this condition.

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What You Can Do

In many cases, it can be challenging to determine whether symptoms are the result of physical health challenges or a mental health condition, since there is significant overlap. For example, a cardiac event can leave the patient with less energy due to damage to the heart, but decreased energy can also be a sign of depression.

If you suspect you may be experiencing depression or anxiety, you should talk with your primary care physician. These conditions are very common, so your doctor likely has experience with them. A short screening test you can take is highly accurate in identifying depression and anxiety. You can also contact your Denver mental health counselor for the same type of assessment. Either way, it can be a relief to know there is a cause for how you are feeling and treatments that can help bring your emotions back into balance.

Other Factors Associated With Fatigue

Depression plays a key role in the experience of fatigue among cardiac patients. Fatigue experienced following myocardial infarction is frequently associated with concomitant depression. 27â31 Fatigue was significantly correlated with depression among female patients at 6- to 12-months after their MI 27 with depression and sleep disturbance explaining 32.7% of the variance in predicting fatigue. Heart failure patients who experienced more physical symptoms, such as fatigue, had less physical functioning and were more likely to be depressed. 17

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Go Back To Work Too Soon

Like Saggio, you may be tempted to return to your job ASAP. But don’t give in.

“I’ve seen plenty of people try to do work while they’re still in the hospital — with a computer and cell phone,” Whiteson says. “They’re not coherent, let alone able to make good decisions.”

Plan in advance for time off and ask your doctor when you can return.

Study Design And Participants

This cross-sectional study is part of the national Self-Management After Thoracic Transplantation project involving heart and lung recipients. The project, which began in 2014 and will continue until 2024, includes six different cohorts, that is two cross-sectional, two prospective longitudinal and two qualitative prospective studies. Within this project, the patients were asked to fill in a total of nine different self-report instruments, measuring various aspects potentially involved in self-management, with specific focus on symptom management. The instruments used in this paper have also been employed in a published study of lung recipients .

The study was carried out at the two thoracic transplant centres in Sweden where HTx is performed. In addition, the largest HTx follow-up clinic was also included in order to access more potential participants. Data collection lasted from 2014 to 2017.

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Don’t Take Your Meds As Prescribed

You may shrug off pain medication because you heard it’s addictive or it makes you constipated, nauseous, or woozy. But skimping on your medicine isn’t smart.

Pain can sometimes interfere with your sleep, appetite, and ability to get around, Whiteson says. And that can make it harder for your body to heal. Ultimately, the goal is to get off medication, but not before you’re ready.

How Long Do The Fatigue And Brain Fog Last After General Anesthesia For Surgery

It depends on your age, the specific drugs used, how long the surgery took and how healthy you were to start with. These days, most general anesthesia drugs are fairly short-acting, which means you wake up quickly and the drugs are mostly out of your system within a few hours, said Dr. Carl Rosow, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But tiny amounts can linger for up to seven days enough so that you may not feel completely normal, especially if you also have a drink or two.

Moreover, if you are one of the unlucky 20 to 40 percent of patients who have nausea and vomiting after general anesthesia, that can add considerably to your recovery time because of dehydration and weakness from not eating, said Dr. John Ulatowski, director and chair of the department of anesthesia and critical care at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Its actually quite difficult to sort out how much of the fatigue and cognitive dysfunction, or temporarily decreased intellectual function, that often follow surgery is due to general anesthesia and how much to the surgery itself. Some post-operative cognitive dysfunction can even occur with regional anesthesia, in which pain is blocked in one part of the body and the patient is sedated, but not rendered fully unconscious. That suggests, said Rosow, that part of post-surgical malaise may be due to the outpouring of stress hormones and inflammatory substances called cytokines.

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Beat Fatigue After Surgery With 6 Simple Steps

It is quite common to feel fatigued after surgery, regardless of whether it was a minor or major procedure. This is because your body expends a lot of energy afterward trying to heal. There is an immune response that kicks in, which can be physically draining as well. Though the duration of the healing process can vary, there are many ways to beat fatigue after surgery.

These can include proper eating and hydration habits, some exercise, and taking it easy, just to name a few. You may also need post-surgery care and restorative therapies. Of course, the information were providing is strictly informational. Be sure to speak to your doctor before altering any of the activities discussed below.

Drive Before You’re Ready

If your doctor tells you not to get behind the wheel — whether it’s for 2 weeks or 2 months — it’s for a good reason. Your reaction time may be slower and you could get into an accident. Until you’re ready to handle it, get lifts from a friend or family member. Or ask them to do your errands for you.

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Complications After Open Heart Surgery

Krystal Morris

Even though the open heart surgery is a very serious operation, it has been performed now for many years with extremely successful results and very little complications.

In most cases in which complications do occur, they are usually temporary and easily treated by doctors.

Some minor complications that can result from open heart surgery include nausea and vomiting, minor infections, bleeding and bruising, abnormally painful scar formations, allergic skin reactions to tape or dressings, and numbness of the skin.

There are major complications that can occur, however, they are uncommon. The most important thing that can play a role in what kind of complications will occur is the general health of the person that has been operated on. The healthier the person is generally, the less likely complications are after the surgery.

Patients that have severe heart disease, diabetes or lung and kidney disease often have a higher chance of developing complications from the open heart surgery.

Fatigue In The Cardiac Population

Fatigue is a universal complaint, affecting most people at one time or another.6 It is more common as people age, as over 50% of older, community-dwelling subjects reported mild or higher levels of fatigue. 7 Fatigue is a multidimensional phenomenon delineated or classified as either physiologic acute or chronic fatigue. Further distinction is made between chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome which is a condition distinguished by fatigue and accompanying symptoms .8 Fatigue is a common symptom associated with many chronic medical and neurological conditions such as renal failure, arthritis , cancer, Parkinsonâs, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease , heart failure, anemia, multiple sclerosis, and lupus. 8 In the cardiac population, fatigue is often considered an indicator of âfunctional reserveâ. 9

Patients who undergo surgery, including cardiac surgery, tend to experience fatigue that peaks between 2- to 4-weeks postoperatively. 10â11 Cytokine levels and opioid use can contribute to the sleep disturbances linked to this early postoperative fatigue. 12â13 The presence of fatigue, for up to several weeks following surgery, is further attributed to loss of muscle tissue and function, to cardiovascular deconditioning response to exercise, patientsâ preoperative levels of fatigue 14 and can be related to decreased cortisol levels. 11

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How Does Physical Therapy Help With Prolonged Fatigue

Physical therapy exercises your heart and lungs and builds up your muscle and bone strength. It delivers oxygen to all your vital organs and makes you feel less fatigued and better in yourself.

Severe fatigue after surgery can be draining mentally and physically but therapists can get you back on the right track.

Implications For Practice And Future Research

Additional study of the phenomenon should include what type of physical activity accounted for the daily energy expenditure, as well describing the type and intensity of exercise. Consideration should be given to evaluating other types of measurement devices, besides an accelerometer, which might be better suited to capture physical activity in the older population of cardiac patients. Future studies need to examine how these variables may differ between fatigued and non-fatigued patients. In addition, further examination of the predictors of fatigue following cardiac surgery and other cardiac events are needed. Additional study of the fatigue experience, including multiple dimensions of fatigue, following CABG surgery is warranted to determine which factors contribute to the presence and persistence of fatigue, as well as how to mitigate the effects of fatigue on functioning and physical activity. Another need is to determine if fatigue is more problematic for females versus male CABG surgical patients, when developing gender specific interventions to reduce fatigue. Assisting CABG surgical patients to recognize and interpret their perceptions of fatigue needs to be explored, as this may be useful in reducing the associated depressive and anxiety symptoms, which commonly occur after CABG surgery.

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Move And Exercise If You Suffer From Extreme Fatigue

People can often remain in bed for days or even weeks after surgery. This can lead to a lack of energy and fatigue. It is vital that you begin moving quickly and trying to exercise. Basic movements and exercise help rebuild muscle strength and improve your blood circulation. Furthermore, they help to improve flexibility and maintain your basic level of fitness.

Relationships Of Fatigue And Functioning

When associated with a medical condition, fatigue along with pain, are strongly associated with lower levels of self-reported physical, role and social functioning, and overall independent functioning among older adult subjects .38 Fatigue is commonly cited as a barrier to participation in physical activity following MI.39 Female cardiac patients, at 3- to12-months after MI, actually altered their activities to relieve their fatigue.40 Female cardiac patients used activity management strategies to deal with their fatigue, which included such actions as pacing activities, âpushing onâ despite fatigue, and recognizing cues of overexertion with activities.41 Similarly, at 5-months after MI, subjects reported the most bothersome condition was their fatigue, which limited physical activity when the âfatigueâ was interpreted as a threat to health.20 Even when female MI patients met minimal levels of physical activity recommended for secondary risk factor modification, as measured by kilocalories expended per week, fatigue still persisted.27 Fatigue consistently was the symptom which had the highest interference on physical activity at 2-, 4- and 6-weeks after PCI .21 Similarly, fatigue had the greatest interference on physical activity and enjoyment of life among CABG surgical patients, in the first 6-months after surgery.42

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Energized For New Year After Heart Surgery

I just wasnt myself, says Barbara Vinck, 85, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I used to walk a couple of miles a day, but I got to the point where I was so doggone tired. I just didnt have any energy at all. Besides a general feeling of fatigue, Barbaras legs had swelled enough that she had to buy different pants.

Barbara, who had been told before that she had a leaky heart valve, told her primary physician how she was feeling. Andrew Calvin, M.D., her cardiologist at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, says it is important for people to share such changes with their primary care provider.

Listen to your body, Dr. Calvin says. Recognize when theres a change, and be honest with your care provider.

MULTIPLE HEART ISSUES

A stress test and echocardiogram revealed Barbara had multiple issues. Heart artery blockages had weakened her heart to the point that it was functioning at about 30 percent. She had severe leakage in her tricuspid valve and lesser leakage in another valve that was a result of her other problems.

Barbara says she had three options.

I could wait and have a heart attack, just have either valve or bypass surgery, or do it all at once, she says. I decided to have everything taken care of.

Its the best thing Ive ever had done to me. It changed my whole life.Barbara Vinck

Barbara says she was not fazed by the prospect of having major surgery, and trusted in her cardiovascular surgery team.

After surgery, getting back up to speed was up to her.

How We Help With Extreme Fatigue

Haym Salomon Home for Rehabilitation & Nursing in Brooklyn NY is the perfect facility for physical and occupational therapy. We understand the importance of recovery after surgery, and the potential harm fatigue can cause.

We accept most insurance plans, including Medicare, Medicaid, HMO PPO EPO Plans, MLTCs and private care. In addition, our finance coordinators will help you smooth out the issues you might have.

Our staff is professional and experienced they can deal with a myriad of situations and help you recover to full health. Moreover, our facilities are impeccably clean and we offer recreational activities that can help your body. Contact us or walk in to see what we can do for you to beat your extreme fatigue.

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