What is follow up care for aortic aneurysm repair surgery?

What is the follow-up care after having an aortic repair? So, again, it varies on the technique employed for an endovascular stent graft of the chest, of the thoracic aorta, of the thoracic abdominal aorta or the inferior aorta, it's effectively the same. So as soon as the patient returns to their normal ward, which might be a couple of days in a complex repair or they'll go straight back from recovery a simple repair, then we encourage people to mobilise to get back to normal activities. Generally speaking, there's no large incision, so there's nothing to worry about, for example, picking things up or going back to moderately strenuous tasks almost immediately. Often, people feel a little bit out of sorts for a couple of weeks because they've had a reasonably big operation, they just don't have any scars to show for it, but this tends to get better and often when I see people six weeks after their surgery they're almost back to normal doing normal activities and even exercising. An open repair whether that's a thoracic abdominal or a standard inframed repair takes longer to recover from there is a big incision in these cases which will cause discomfort which might mean breathing and things is a little bit more difficult right at the beginning also just moving around is a bit harder so it's very important when you have these procedures that as soon as you can you get up and move around get your muscles going also return to returning to eat normal diet often when you have big operations like this then you don't want to eat so much you're in hospital for a while and things can be slow to get going from that perspective um i would say normally at six weeks when i see people if they've had a straightforward operation and they're relatively fit to begin with then they're almost back to normal although people often report low energy levels at this point. The majority of patients at three or six months will be totally recovered but really it's just that last little bit of getting back to normal from being almost recovered that I see most often in patients. It is a bigger operation, it will have longer lasting effects.